Introduction to Semantic Technologies

This course aims to introduce students to semantic technologies in general and the Semantic Web in particular, and their use in various organizational settings. Semantic technologies enable the explicit representation of knowledge in ontologies and deducing implicitly available knowledge from the stored ontology, thus paving the way machines to process the knowledge. Ontology is the backbone of the Semantic Web that models the semantics of data and represents them in markup languages proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Key semantic technologies include XML, RDF, OWL explicit metadata, ontologies, logic and inferencing which the course will cover. Students are exposed to concepts as well as programming in XML, RDF and OWL by using examples from the business applications. The course requires written and programming assignments, and a term project that involves building ontology for a business application, andimplementing it by using RDF and OWL.