Semantic Web books: Semantic Web Primer

Hello! I thought it would be nice to post details about some books I've read about Semantic Web.

The first book I I've read was "A Semantic Web Primer" by Grigoris Antoniou and Frank van Harmelen.

This is a good book for someone who wants to understand how RDF, OWL and ontologies work. But there are no examples of how can anybody  actually use RDF and OWL in applications.

A more formal description of the book:

The development of the Semantic Web, with machine-readable content, has the potential to revolutionize the World Wide Web and its use. A Semantic Web Primer provides an introduction and guide to this emerging field, describing its key ideas, languages, and technologies. Suitable for use as a textbook or for self-study by professionals, it concentrates on undergraduate-level fundamental concepts and techniques that will enable readers to proceed with building applications on their own. It includes exercises, project descriptions, and annotated references to relevant online materials. A Semantic Web Primer is the only available book on the Semantic Web to include a systematic treatment of the different languages (XML, RDF, OWL, and rules) and technologies (explicit metadata, ontologies, and logic and inference) that are central to Semantic Web development. The book also examines such crucial related topics as ontology engineering and application scenarios. 

After an introductory chapter, topics covered in succeeding chapters include XML and related technologies that support semantic interoperability; RDF and RDF Schema, the standard data model for machine-processable semantics; and OWL, the W3C-approved standard for a Web ontology language more extensive than RDF Schema; rules, both monotonic and nonmonotonic, in the framework of the Semantic Web; selected application domains and how the Semantic Web would benefit them; the development of ontology-based systems; and current debates on key issues and predictions for the future.

You can take a limited inside look here

Cheers,

Angeliki

Protégé - a key to success

Last year, I chose a course about Semantic Technologies and I had to develop an Ontology using OWL and test it with Protégé. I was familiar with OWL coding so at first I started writing the code with a txt editor. But as I was inserting new  classes, I realized that typing all this code would be a waste of time.  So, I decided to work on Protégé which generates the code.

After googling for a while, I found this great tutorial by Matthew Horridge and his team. I downloaded the 1.2 Edition. I highly recommend  this tutorial to anybody who intends to work with Protégé and OWL ontologies.

From the official site of Protégé:

Protégé is a free, open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework.

The Protégé platform supports two main ways of modeling ontologies via the Protégé-Frames and Protégé-OWL editors. Protégé ontologies can be exported into a variety of formats including RDF(S), OWL, and XML Schema. (more)

Protégé is based on Java, is extensible, and provides a plug-and-play environment that makes it a flexible base for rapid prototyping and application development. (more)

Protégé is supported by a strong community of developers and academic, government and corporate users, who are using Protégé for knowledge solutions in areas as diverse as biomedicine, intelligence gathering, and corporate modeling.

Cheers,

Angeliki

Semantic Web keywords

• Semantic Web: Semantic Web is a group of methods and technologies to allow machines to understand the meaning - or "semantics" - of information on the "World Wide Web". (wikipedia)
• Ontology: In computer and information science, an ontology is a formal representation of knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason (see reasoning definition)about the entities within that domain, and may be used to describe the domain.(wikipedia)
• Reasoning : Reasoning is the cognitive process of looking for reasons, beliefs, conclusions, actions or feelings. (wikipedia)
• OWL: The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. The languages are characterised by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web. OWL is endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and has attracted academic, medical and commercial interest. In October 2007, a new W3C working group was started to extend OWL with several new features as proposed in the OWL 1.1 member submission. This new version, called OWL 2, soon found its way into semantic editors such as Protégé and semantic reasoners such as Pellet,RacerPro, FaCT++ and HermiT. (wikipedia)

Cheers,
Angeliki