Semantic Web Systems: these pages are being updated for 2015-16

Semantic Web Systems is a Level 11 course given in Semester 2, and it is open to 4th and 5th year undergraduates and MSc students.

word cloud The Semantic Web has been held up as an extension of the current Web by Tim Berners-Lee. According to this vision, the Web becomes a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge. For this to happen, Web content needs to be expressed in a form that can be processed intelligently by machines.

Some aspects of the Semantic Web have already been developed as specifications and implementations. Other parts are still highly speculative or too challenging to solve yet, but are the subject of considerable research and experimentation. This is an exciting and evolving subject, worth studying in more detail.

Lecture Schedule

Lectures are held on Mondays and Thursdays at 12:10 pm – 1.00 pm in the Teviot Lecture Theatre - Doorway 5 of the Medical School. Lectures start on Monday of Week 1 of Semester 2.

The schedule of weekly topics is currently being updated for the 2015/2016 session

Week	Date		Topic	Handout	Reading
Week 1	11/01	1	Introduction	Slides	SWWO Ch 1, The Semantic Web
Week 1	14/01	2	Ontologies	Slides	SWWO Ch 2, Folksonomy links, W3C Ontologies page
Week 2	18/01	3	Ontological Representation	Slides	Sections 1.1-1.4 in Ontological Engineering
Week 2	21/01	4	Metadata	Slides
Week 3	25/01	5	RDF Models	Slides	SWWO Ch 3, RDF Primer
Week 3	28/01	6	RDF Data Structures	Slides	SWWO Ch 3, Turtle Primer, Information and Non-information Resources
Week 4	01/02	7	RDFS	Slides	SWWO Ch 6, 7
Week 4	04/02	8	Querying	Slides	SWWO Ch 5
Week 5	08/02	9	Linked Open Data	Slides	Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space Ch 2
Week 5	11/02	10	Practical lab Different location: Teaching lab 1.B30 (Drill Hall)	Slides
ILW	15/02		Innovative Learning Week
ILW	18/02		Innovative Learning Week
Week 6	22/02	11	Description Logics & OWL	Slides	From SHIQ and RDF to OWL: The Making of a Web Ontology Language
Week 6	25/02	12	Ontology Engineering	Slides	SWWO Ch 14
Week 7	29/02	13	Ontology Matching	Slides	Ontology matching: state of the art and future challenges
Week 7	03/03	14	The programmable Web	Slides
Week 8	07/03	15	Web Services (1)	Slides	Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web Ch 8
Week 8	10/03	16	Web Services (2)	Slides	OWL-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services, Bringing Semantics to Web Services with OWL-S
Week 9	14/03	17	Automated Question-Answering Using Semantic Web Technologies	Slides	Guest Lecture by Kobby Nuamah
Week 9	17/03	18	The Age of Social Machines	Slides	Guest Lecture by Petros Papapanagiotou
Week 10	21/03	19	No Lecture
Week 10	24/03		No Lecture

Syllabus

Introduction to the aims and purpose of the Semantic Web
Fundamentals of knowledge representation for the Semantic Web
- Ontologies and databases
- Formats: RDF, DL, OWL
Data querying
Linked Open Data
Web services
The future of the Semantic Web

Course Information

The course lecturer is Jacques Fleuriot. Email: jdf @ inf.ed.ac.uk
The course TA is: Paolo Pareti
The coursework will be marked by: Can Cui, email: C.Cui-4 @ sms.ed.ac.uk
The student representatives are: Virdee Jivan, email: s1578508 @ sms.ed.ac.uk and Emily Dreke, email: s1564218 @ sms.ed.ac.uk
Course Reading
- The two main texts are:
  - Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modelling in RDFS and OWL. Dean Allemang and Jim Hendler
  - Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space. Tom Heath and Christian Bizer
- Other recommended books:
  - Querying and Updating SPARQL 1.1 Bob DuCharme (In-depth guide to the standard semantic web query language)
  - A Semantic Web Primer Grigoris Antoniou and Frank van Harmelen (Quite detailed presentations of XML, RDF and OWL)
  - Explorer's Guide to the Semantic Web Thomas B Passin (Less technical than Antoniou and van Harmelen, but covers more topics)
  - Agency and the Semantic Web Christopher Walton (Good coverage of Semantic Web concepts and their relevance to intelligent agents)

Coursework

There are two pieces of coursework. The total worth of the coursework is 30%.

Assignment 1. Deadline: Monday 29th of February 2016, 4pm. The marking scheme and solution guide have been released.
Assignment 2. Deadline: Friday 25th of March 2016, 4pm. The marking scheme and solution guide for part 1 and the ones for part 2 have been released.

Optional Tasks

Q&A Platform

We encourage you to use our SWS Q&A class on Piazza to ask questions about the course and the assignments.

Office Hours

If you have questions about the course you can meet Paolo Pareti during his office hours in the Informatics Forum, room 2.40 (or if he is not there, in room 2.15 instead).
Office hours will be on Wednesdays from 11:00 to 12:00. They will run on a weekly basis, starting on Wednesday the 27th of January. However, there won't be office hours on the 17th of February (during the Innovative Learning Week). The last one will be on Monday the 21st of March from 11:00 to 12:00 (please note the unusual day of the week).

Exam

Students may find the past exam papers for MASWS and SWS useful when revising. Please note, however, that both the content and the rubric of the exam may be different for the SWS exam this year.