Semantic Web: Key Ideas, Techniques, Applications

Grigoris Antoniou

Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Greece

The Semantic Web is a W3C driven major development aiming at improving the state of the World Wide Web through the use of semantic technology. The basic idea is to enrich the current Web with machine-processable information about the meaning (semantics) of information content. This way, the meaning of displayed information is accessible not only to humans, but becomes also accessible to software agents. The key techniques of the Semantic Web are semantic annotations (meta-data), such that Web information carries its meaning on its sleeve, ontologies which organize terms in a conceptualization of a domain, thus connecting semantic annotations with each other and serving as a basis for interoperability, and logical reasoning, which processes metadata and ontologies in a declarative manner.

The proposed tutorial will present the Semantic Web vision and overall design, describe the basic techniques with particular focus on the W3C standards of RDF/S and OWL, present some key research questions, and illustrate the usefulness of the Semantic Web on the basis of some applications.

Content Outline

1. The Semantic Web Vision
2. Semantic Web Technologies
   1. Semantic metadata in RDF
   2. Simple ontologies in RDF Schema
   3. Web ontology language OWL
   4. The role of reasoning
3. Current research questions
4. Selected applications
   1. Knowledge management
   2. Electronic commerce
   3. Electronic learning

Everyone interested in learning the basics of the Semantic Web. Potentially the topic is interesting to a very broad circle of EEE-05 attendees.

The tutorial will be smooth with very little prior knowledge expected.

While a textbook will not be required, participants will have a good avenue of expanding their knowledge of the Semantic Web after the tutorial using the book

G. Antoniou, F. van Harmelen: A Semantic Web Primer, MIT Press 2004,

with which the tutorial will be compatible.

Grigoris Antoniou is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Crete, and Head of the Information Systems Laboratory at FORTH. Previously he held professorial appointments at the University of Bremen, Germany, and Griffith University, Australia.

His research interests lie in knowledge representation and reasoning, and its applications to the Web information systems and e-Commerce. He has published over 150 technical papers in international journals and conferences. He is member of the European Networks of Excellence Delos (digital libraries) and REWERSE (semantic web reasoning). In November 2004 he organized a highly successful workshop on Rules for the Semantic Web at the International Semantic Web Conference, with proceedings published in the Springer LNCS series.

Antoniou has a long teaching experience at university level, and has presented tutorials and short courses in summer schools and at international events. He is author of three textbooks published by high quality publishers (Addison-Wesley, MIT Press). His most recent textbook, A Semantic Web Primer (co-authored with Frank van Harmelen) has already become the standard teaching reference in this area.

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