CIS344 - The Semantic Web

Dept of Computing, Goldsmiths
Academic year 2009-2010
Instructor: Dr Rodger Kibble
R.Kibble@gold.ac.uk

The course will mostly be delivered via learn.gold. An enrolment key will be given out at the first lecture. This page gives some basic information about the content of the course and recommended readings.

Course overview

The "Semantic Web" is a work-in-progress, consisting of various initiatives to make web documents more "understandable" by computer programs such as search engines and e-commerce agents.

This course will give an overall outline of the Semantic Web "vision" and will concentrate on the Semantic Web technologies that have reached a level of maturity and acceptance in the web-authoring community, particularly XML, RDF and OWL.

The course will include extensive hands-on experience with Protege, a state-of-the art graphical editor for Semantic Web documents.

On completing the course, students should have achieved reasonable competence in these technologies and in addition, be able to:

  • Explain the motivations for extending web technologies with semantic models, ontologies and inference systems.
  • Design an ontology in a restricted domain, implement it using the Protege editor and query it using SPARQL or a similar language.
  • Demonstrate a basic understanding of the formal logical principles underpinning Semantic Web technologies.
  • Idenfity suitable applications for Semantic Web technologies and show some awareness of existing applications.

The recommended readings are as follows (additional online resources will be available during the term):

Main text
Programming the Semantic Web, Toby Segaran, Colin Evans and Jamie Taylor, 2009. O'Reilly, ISBN 978-0596153816
Supplementary texts
A Semantic Web Primer, 2nd edition, Grigoris Antoniou and Frank van Harmelen, 2008. MIT Press, ISBN 978-0-262-01242-3
XML Pocket Reference, 3rd edition, O'Reilly, Simon St. Laurent and Michael Fitzgerald, ISBN 10: 0-596-10050-7 | ISBN 13: 9780596100506
Preparatory reading
The Semantic Web in Action by Lee Feigenbaum et al, Scientific American, December 2007. Ontologies 101 by Natalya F. Noy and Deborah L. McGuinness, Stanford University
Online resources
Presentation by Ivan Herman as used in Friday's lecture.
Sample assessment
First coursework
Second coursework
Exam paper