ICWI 2005: Conference Tutorial #1

The goal of the Semantic Web is to give meaning to (Web) resources to
make them understandable for software agents and other programs and
improve interoperability. Resources are thereby associated with meta
data. To realize this goal, the World Wide Web Consortiums proposes a
stack of standards, often called the "Semantic Web layer cake". The most
important building blocks of the Semantic Web are ontologies that are
used to explicitly represent the meaning of terms in vocabularies and
the relationships between these terms. Ontologies can be expressed in
the Ontology Web Language (OWL) that is built on top of the Resource
Description Framework (RDF).

This half-day tutorial will give an overview over the most important
Semantic Web standards. The tutorial will consist of four 45 minute
sessions with a 30 minute coffee break.

Outline:
1.a)Introduction and motivation
b)Extensible Markup Language (XML) and beyond
2.Resource Description Framework (RDF) and RDFS
<coffee break>
3.Ontology Web Language (OWL) and ontology engineering
4.a)Logical foundations of the Semantic Web and reasoning
b)Semantic Web tools overview and summary

This tutorial is intended for conference participants who are interested
in an introductory overview in Semantic Web technologies and languages.

Dr. Wolfgang Woerndl is a senior researcher and lecturer at Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM, University of Technology Munich, Germany). He is a member of the Chair Informatik XI - Applied Informatics / Cooperative Systems. His research interests include the Semantic Web, information personalization and E-Learning. This tutorial is in part based on a graduate lecture course "Distributed problem solving: software agents and the Semantic Web" which was held at TUM in the summer term 2005 by Dr. Woerndl.

Dr. Georg Groh is a senior researcher at Technische Universitaet
Muenchen (TUM, University of Technology Munich, Germany). He is a member of the Chair Informatik XI - Applied Informatics / Cooperative Systems. His activities include the organization of the Munich Knowledge Management Circle, teaching activities in discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science and various scientific projects. His research interests include natural language processing, artificial intelligence & Semantic Web and mobile communities.

Dipl. Inform. (Univ.) Karlheinz Toni is a researcher at Technische Universität Muenchen, (TUM, University of Technology Munich, Germany). He is a member of the Chair Informatik XI - Applied Informatics / Cooperative Systems. He has a broad spectrum of professional experience in software development and teaching outside the university. In his PhD thesis he is investigating semantic models for natural language texts. His research interests and fields of teaching activities at TUM include XML technologies, Semantic Web and information management.