CS848-Winter 2011

Topics in Databases: The Semantic Web

Lectures

Lectures start at 4pm and end no later than 6:30pm on Tuesdays, beginning January 4th. Lectures take place in MC2036A.

Instructor

Grant Weddell

Office: DC3346
Phone: ext 34463
Email: gweddell@uwaterloo.ca

Organization

This is a seminar course consisting of presentations by both the instructor and the students. The focus of the course is on the semantic web, but the subject material remains quite broad: anything relating to RDF as a foundation. There are many interesting developments underway that are also likely to be of strategic importance, e.g., the OWL ontology language standard, the SPARQL query language, and so on.

Credit

Final grades for participants enrolled for credit are determined on the basis of three components:

Class participation: 25%. It is important that everyone participating attends all lectures and completes the reading assignments on time.
Course seminar: 30%. Each student is required to give at least one seminar lasting for about one hour each on a topic to be negotiated with the instructor. A significant part of the grading for this seminar is based on the quality of the presentation and of the slides.
Course project: 45%. Each student is also required to deliver a course project. The scope and topic of the project are negotiated with the instructor during the first half of the course.

Presentation Slides

Introduction: Introductory slides by Ian Horrocks on the need for the semantic web and on RDFS.

Introduction (cont'd): Introductory slides by Umberto Straccia, also on the need for the semantic web and on RDFS.

FOL: Brief overview of first-order logic, basic syntax and semantics.

RDFS and SPARQL: Enrico Franconi's PODS presentation on a formal understanding of RDFS and SPARQL conjunctive queries.

History of relational databases: Grant's slides for his presentation on the history of relational databases.

OWL and DLs: Overview of the OWL ontology language standard and its relationship to description logics, also by Umberto Straccia.

Possible Presentation Topics

EL++ (a): The first major published work on EL++, a PTIME dialect of description logic.

EL++ (b): A more recent publication on EL++.

DL-Lite: An archive journal article on the DL-Lite family of description logics, again PTime dialects.

SPARQL: The W3C proposal for the SPARQL query language for RDF triples.

Schedule of Course Presentations

Reading Assignments

To be read by January 18th:

RDF and RDFS: Introductory definition of RDFS.

RDFS Semantics: A non-standard semantics for RDFS by Patrick Hayes.

To be read by February 8th:

SPARQL: The W3C proposal for the SPARQL query language for RDF triples.