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Ontologies and Knowledge Bases module (COMP718) - 2012, semester 1
This page contains material for the BSc honours (4th year) module "Ontologies and Knowledge Bases" (COMP718) taught by Maria Keet, at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, in Semester 1, 2012.
General Information
Aims
The principal aim of this module is to provide the participant with a comprehensive overview of ontology engineering and its usage in ontology-driven information systems and knowledge bases.
A secondary aim is to provide hands-on experience in ontology development and Semantic Web Technologies that illustrate the theory, such as language features, automated reasoning, querying ontologies, and top-down and bottom-up ontology development.
This module covers material such that, upon completion, the student:
- has a general understanding of the notion of what ontologies and knowledge bases are, what they can be used for, how, and when not;
- has obtained a good understanding of the, currently, main ontology languages---OWL and its underlying Description Logics languages---in order to represent the knowledge in ontologies formally and to reason over them, and have a basic understanding of what the automated reasoner does;
- can confidently use methods and methodologies to develop ontologies, including the top-down approach with foundational ontologies and bottom-up using non-ontological resources such as relational databases, natural language or thesauri; and
- has become acquainted with several major applications and application scenarios, such as the Semantic Web, ontology-based data access, and ontologies for the life sciences and other domains, and has had a taste of the research trends in the field.
Interwoven in the module's aims is skills development for the students' BSc(honours) project. The students will become familiar with reading scientific literature and will gain experience in report writing and presenting their work to their peers.
Module material
The course material consists of:
- The printed and bound lecture notes (soft copy of the COMP718 Lecture Notes);
- Lecture slides posted here and on the module's Moodle page;
- Reading material for the lectures: papers, book chapters, standardization documentation, which are listed at the end of each chapter in the lecture notes and the Moodle.
- Material for the chosen mini-project (some are already listed in the bibliography, and additional ones will be made available depending on the chosen project topic).
Lecture venue and time
The lectures will be held in the honours seminar room (Block H1, Westville Campus, and honours seminar room at the Pietermaritzburg Campus), from 07.02.2012 to 26.05.2012 each Tuesday 9.00-11.00 (minus midterm break and festive holidays; details on the module's Moodle page).
Contact information
Office hours: by prior arrangement via e-mail
School of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science
Block H1, Westville campus, 3rd floor
tel (office): ext. 1035
email: {surname}@ukzn.ac.za
Lectures
Section 4 of the Module outline contains brief descriptions of the topics.
The COMP718 Moodle page and the COMP718 Lecture Notes contain the required and recommended readings, and the exercises. The answers to the exercises are brief and more alike a quick reminder of what is discussed in the lab.
- Introduction
- FOL recap and Description Logics
- The Web Ontology Language OWL
- OWL 2 and Reasoning
- Top-down Ontology Development I
- Top-down Ontology Development II
- Bottom-up Ontology Development
- Methods and Methodologies
- Ontology/Conceptual Model-based Data Access I
- Ontology/Conceptual Model-based Data Access II
- Temporal ontologies
- Recap and Research Trends
- Slides (more temporal; see last week's slides);
- additional files: none (recap done on the white board)
- Mini-project Presentations
- no slides (or your slides, if you are willing to share them online)
- no additional files (or your wite-up and/or tool, if you are willing to share them online)
Supplementary material
Other resources you might find of use:
- Pascal Hitzler, Markus Kroetzsch, Sebastian Rudolph. Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies. Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2009, 455p.
- Steffen Staab, Rudi Studer (eds.). Handbook on ontologies. Berlin : Springer, 2004.
- Frank van Harmelen, Vladimir Lifschitz and Bruce Porter (Eds.). Handbook of Knowledge Representation. Elsevier, 2008, 1034p.
- Other books in the library, which include topics such as ontology matching, real world applications from industry, ontology management, services, ontology learning and population from text, reasoning & rules, etc. See the "Books about ontologies" in the Bibliography of the COMP718 Lecture Notes.
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