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Weekly Activities
Web Semantics course (course content is still very much in process
and will continue to develop):
1) Broad Overview
- what is this all about - the W3C semantic web layer cake;
what did the Scientific American article really talk about? Information
architecture, past and future. This lecture is about setting context.
What are the foundation technologies and who are the contributing
communities? Convergence of web technologies, AI machine decidable
logics, markup language and manipulation efforts, all over the last
decade. Data models, data exchange, abstracting across data, machine
'understanding' of web. Where do these standards come from, and
what are they driving toward?
Invited Speaker - TBD -W3C
Reading Assignments:
- Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila, The
Semantic Web:
A new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers will
unleash a revolution of new possibilities, Scientific American,
May, 2001
- D. Moschella, Semantic Applications, or Revenge of the Librarians:
Excerpt from Customer Driven IT: How Users are Shaping Technology Industry
Growth Harvard Business School Press, 2003,
- J. Hendler, Science
and the Semantic Web,
Michael. Daconta, L. Obrst, K. Smith, The Semantic Web: A Guide
to the Future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management,
Wiley & Sons, 2003, chapters 1,2
Back
2) Markup -
annotating information, adding info to info; XML for markup, why
do this, where does it fit in to the semantic web ideas? What is
it being used for? What are XML's strengths, limitations; is it
all we need for information reuse? E.g., "Talking about (real?)
things: XML: A registration document contains a single license number
field. RDF: A car has a unique license number." Semantic data
is potentially much more reusable, and is about things in the 'real'
world, not just things in documents or databases. What does that
mean? Projects - talking about projects for class and requirements
for students.
Reading Assignments:
- Michael. Daconta, L. Obrst, K. Smith, The Semantic Web: A Guide
to the Future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management,
Wiley & Sons, chapters 3,4
- K. Ahmed, D Ayers, M. Birbeck, et. al., Professional XML Meta
Data, Wrox Press Ltd., 2001, chapters 1,2
- E. Ray, Learning XML; Creating Self-Describing Data, O'Reilly
& Associates, 2001, chapters 1-5
- XML online tutorials: XML
Revolution: Technologies for the Web
- Interactive
XML tutorial with quizzes
- XML
Tutorial
Back
3) RDF -
what is it and why is it needed? What is semantic data? Describing
relationships in data; markup for metadata; semantic markup for
web pages - inline, or in referenced databases - SI site example;
power of shared standard - network effects of rdf described data
that semweb is built on; will it succeed? How is it being developed?
The community of standards development at W3C.
Invited Speaker - Eric Miller, head of W3C Semantic Web Activities
Area
Reading Assignments:
- Michael. Daconta, L. Obrst, K. Smith, The Semantic Web: A Guide
to the Future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management,
Wiley & Sons, 2003, chapter 5
- Shelley Powers, Practical RDF: Solving Problems with the Resource
Description Framework, O'Reilly & Associates, 2003, chapters
1-7, 10
- Frank Manola, Eric Miller, RDF
Primer, January 23, 2003
- RDF online tutorials:
Back
4) Examples of the
use of RDF. Spending more time with fundamentals of semantic
markup, and then starting to put what we have learned into practice.
Some quick examples to show the value of this approach. Why do I
want machines reading my pages? Friend
of a Friend, creating machine readable home pages. Semantic
blogging, adding semantic info to items shared over the blog channels,
allowing navigation and search along semantic rather than simply
chronological or serendipitous connections. Personal Information
management using RDF - haystack
project: a "universal Information client". The School
of Information semantic markup project, intro to using TAP at SI.
Demos and discussions with developer(s).
Invited Speakers: tbd (from MIT haystack team)
Reading Assignments:
Back
5) Ontologies
- what are they and how are they alike/different from things we
are familiar with, e.g., taxonomies, relational databases and relational
db entity diagrams, universal modeling language (UML); allowing
enriched relationships descriptions; how to make them with Protégé;
who is using them (google, yahoo, etc).
Reading Assignments:
- R. Davis, .H. Shrobe, and P. Szolovits, What
is a Knowledge Representation? AI Magazine, 14(1):17-33, 1993
- W. Pidcock, What
are the differences between a vocabulary, a taxonomy, a thesaurus,
an ontology, and a metamodel?
- Michael. Daconta, L. Obrst, K. Smith, The Semantic Web: A Guide
to the Future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management,
Wiley & Sons, 2003, chapters 7,8
- Shelley Powers, Practical RDF: Solving Problems with the Resource
Description Framework, O'Reilly & Associates, 2003, chapter
12
- D. McGuinness, Ontologies
Come of Age
Back
6) Tools for
Ontology construction - writing your own and/or using
an editor (like early days of HTML). Notation3 - an easy way to
write down relationships; "RDF for sketching"; tutorial
on N3. Protégé, a GUI for model construction; tutorial
on Protege. Using existing schemas, models, ontologies; building
on others' work and seeing how it contributes to interoperability.
Examples, lots of examples.
Reading Assignments:
Back
7) TAP project at
Stanford in depth. Demo and application for SI pages;
Science of Collaboratories ontologies - use in research to organize
complex info spaces - useful in analysis? investigating use of knowledge
representation methods to formalize research descriptions. Example
from SOC team.
Invited Speaker - TBD
-on TAP Project (and/or on openCYC, the open source version of the
Cyc technology, probably the world's largest and most complete general
knowledge base and commonsense reasoning engine; may save that part
for week 9.)
Back
8) AI history and development,
convergence with semweb ideas. This is the overview of the development
of formal logics and their application to reasoning systems. Description
logics, developments and applications in semweb ideas, problems.
The view from the AI side of the house. DAML, OIL and now the OWL
ontology languages; moving up the semantic web layer cake.
Invited Speaker - Ian
Horrocks; OIL, DAML-OIL, OWL author/contributor
Reading Assignments:
- D. Schwartz, From
Open IS Semantics to the Semantic Web: The Road Ahead, IEEE
Intelligent Systems, May/June 2003:52-58
- O. Lassila and D. McGuiness., The
Role of Frame-Based Representation on the Semantic Web, Linkoping
Electronic Articles in Computer and Information Science, vol.6,
no. 5, 2001,
- F. Baader, D. Calvanese, D. McGuinness, D. Nardi, P Patel (Eds.)
The Description Logic Handbook: Theory, Implementation and Applications,
Cambridge University Press, 2003, chapters 1,2,4
- M. Smith, C. Welty, D. L. McGuinness, OWL
Web Ontology Language Guide
Back
9) Reasoning engines
- Cwm, the W3C reasoning engine, a general-purpose semantic web
data processing tool (www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/doc/cwm.html);
playing with the RDF models we have built, using some N3 forms of
statements, and investigating the ideas of reasoning over them;
working with research software and available tools; example of Connaly
travel reservation system built with RDF and cwm. Analyzing SOC
ontologies with a reasoning engine, perhaps. First steps in determining
proofs on the web: systems should be able to explain their actions,
sources, and beliefs. Time spent exercising tools and gaining experience
with concepts behind them.
Reading Assignments:
Back
10) Semantic Web-enabled
agents - The web as a global database and distributed
computer, vs. the web as an information store. What are agents in
this environment, how are they realized through web services, what
do ontologies have to do with all this, and what's the difference
between getting a reference to cattle populations and asking the
web a question: "how many cows are there in Texas?" Realizing
an example from the original Scientific American semantic web article:
having software agents and web-based services organize a series
of hospital appointments, map out the transportation to them for
you and your parent (the patient), figure out how to share the transportation
burden with your sister, what fits in whose calendar, and suggest
where to purchase prescription medicine on the way home.
Invited Speaker: TBD, UMaryland
Reading Assignments:
- Michael. Daconta, L. Obrst, K. Smith, The Semantic Web: A Guide
to the Future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management,
Wiley & Sons, 2003, chapter 4
- Dieter Fensel, J. Hendler, H. Lieberman, W. Wahlster (Eds.),
Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its
Full Potential, MIT Press, 2003, chapters 12, 13, 14, 15
Back
11) Applications in
Education - Edutella; IMS/RDF/P2P and the construction
of a semantically informed, distributed resource base for educational
objects. The debates within the IMS (www.imsproject.org)
community on XML versus RDF representations of semantic information.
Invited Speaker - TBD
Reading Assignments:
- EDUTELLA: A
P2P Networking Infrastructure, Wolfgang Nejdl, Boris Wolf,
Changtao Qu, Stefan, Ambjorn Naeve, Mikael Nilsson, Matthias Palmer,
November 14, 2001
Back
12) Applications in
business - Network
Inference. Hudson. Uses
of ontologies and RDF; Sun swoRDFish and enterprise knowledge management
systems.
Invited Speaker(s)/Demos - TBD
Reading Assignments:
Back
13) Tracking an emerging
discipline - Working across the disciplines of the web,
the grid (the high performance international science network), and
AI-based disciplines for knowledge representation/reasoning systems.
Invited Speaker - Carole
Goble, Editor-in-Chief of Journal
of Web Semantics
14) Project Presentations
- we discuss projects students have engaged in that could include
constructing concept maps, RDF models, RDF instance databases, or
ontologies, and efforts at using the available tools for construction,
and reasoning engines to investigate them.
Back
Course books:
(working list)
- Spinning the Semantic Web; edited by Dieter Fensel, et
al; MIT Press, 2003
- The Semantic Web: A Guide to the Future of XML, Web Services
and Knowledge Management; Daconta, Obrst, and Smith; Wiley,
2003
- Practical RDF; Shelley Powers; OReilly, 2003
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