42500 - Semantic Web

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, the student is familiar with the concepts, standards and languages that constitute the architecture of the Semantic Web, the technologies and models for the representation of metadata and ontologies, and the ways in which different resources can be integrated and utilised (e.g. according to the Linked Data approach). The course explores the new ways of organising, integrating, managing and retrieving resources that the Semantic Web and the Web of Data make available today.

Course contents

This course is aimed at providing both a solid conceptual framework on the subject of knowledge representation in the Web of Data, and the basis for the development and use of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) by means of the most widespread tools in computer science and shared standards, highlighting issues of interest and analysing some specific topics. The growth of Web contents requires the study of theories, methodologies and techniques for the conceptualisation of these contents. This course aims to provide students with an understanding of the formal assumptions, languages and technologies that allow applications to be realised, as well as specific skills in the use and development of computer systems for the semantic management of knowledge. In particular, the following topics will be addressed:

• KG in the Web of Data (Semantic Web, Linked Open Data)
• Semantic technologies (RDF, RDFS, logical inference, RDFa, microformats)
• Querying RDF (DBPedia KG, SPARQL)
• Knowledge representation using ontologies (OWL)
• KG applications (ontologies, KG programming, visualisation and analytics)
• Advanced KG applications (KG embeddings, KG completion, KG mappings and alignment, semantic search)
• Graph machine learning

Readings/Bibliography

Lecture notes distributed by the lecturer during the course and published on the reference site.

Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling for Linked Data, RDFS, and OWL, third edition, Dean Allemang, James Hendler, Fabien Gandon.

Teaching methods

Lectures and workshop activities

Assessment methods

The objective of the learning assessment is to find out whether the concepts, standards and languages studied have been understood and whether the student has developed practical skills in working with them. The way in which this is done is by carrying out 3 projects. In the first one, the student is required to analyse and describe the functionalities and characteristics of a project using Semantic Web tools from among the many introduced in the lesson and belonging to the world of industry, business, PA or academia.

In the second and third projects, students are required to develop their own prototype project, first using RDF and RDFS and linking the represented data as far as possible to existing and shared vocabularies, then modelling the domain knowledge via OWL and operating automatic reasoning on it. The domain of interest is chosen in agreement with the lecturer.

Teaching tools

All the teaching materials used are also made available in electronic form and can be accessed via username and password at AMS Campus - AlmaDL - University of Bologna. The same site periodically updates and publishes supporting teaching materials

Office hours

See the website of Antonella Carbonaro

See the website of Gianluca Moro