Home page of the course
Knowledge Representation and Ontologies

News

• 01/07/2012: The final version of the lecture notes for Part 6 (ALC) is available.

Course presentation form

Office hours:

• Diego Calvanese
• Mariano Rodriguez-Muro: by previous email or verbal appointment

Objectives. The aim of the Knowledge Representation and Ontologies course is to provide students with an understanding of the formal foundations of classical logic-based knowledge representation languages, with an overview of the reasoning methods for them, and of the application of techniques developed in knowledge representation to classical data management problems. Most of the course will focus on description Logics and on ontology languages.

Prerequisites. Notions about first-order logic as taught in an introductory BSc course on Logic; notions about relational databases as taught in an introductory Bsc course.

Preliminary course program

Teaching material

• [M1] Lecture Notes for Knowledge Representation and Ontologies. Diego Calvanese. 2012.
• [M2] The Description Logic Handbook: Theory, Implementation and Applications (2nd edition). Cambridge University Press, 2007. Edited by F. Baader, D. Calvanese, D. McGuinness, D. Nardi, P.F. Patel-Schneider.
• [M3] Ontologies and databases: The DL-Lite approach. Diego Calvanese, Giuseppe De Giacomo, Domenico Lembo, Maurizio Lenzerini, Antonella Poggi, Mariano Rodriguez-Muro, and Riccardo Rosati. In Semantic Technologies for Informations Systems - 5th Int. Reasoning Web Summer School (RW 2009), volume 5689 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 255-356. Springer, 2009.
• Additional reading material is available here.
• Further reading material might also be assigned on an individual basis, depending on the assigned project.

Useful links

• The Description Logics homepage, containing also links to the DL workshops.
• The Description Logic Complexity Navigator

Teaching format. The course is organized as frontal lectures on the course topics complemented by monographic seminars that serve as a starting point for discussing the techniques involved. During lab sessions the students will familiarize with the usage and internals of state-of-the-art tools for managing and querying relational data sources through an ontology, and will work on a project.

• Schedule: The course is taught in the 2nd semester: from February 29th to June 5th, 2012.
  • Lectures:
    • Wednesday, 8:30-10:30, Lecture Room E420, Ser E
    • Thursday, 8:30-10:30, Lecture Room E412, Ser E
  • Exercises: Wednesday: 16:00-18:00, Lecture Room E412, Ser E
    

  Note: During the first weeks of the course there will be no exercises. The skipped exercises will be held in the final part of the course.
  

• See also the on-line timetables for changes.
  

• Teaching assistant: Mariano Rodriguez Muro

Projects. The projects are assigned in the second part of the course, after the necessary theoretical notions to work on the project have been presented. Projects may be carried out individually or in small groups of 2 to 3 students. The projects will build on advanced tools for ontology editing and ontology management.

• Detailed information about the project and software tools for project development will be made available here.

Assessment. The exam consists of:

• a project, counting for 30% of the mark, and
• a final oral exam, counting for 70% of the mark.
  For the oral exam, each student will be assigned two topics that she/he has to discuss in oral form, in roughly 15 minutes each. Each of the two topics will be assigned to the student 15 minutes in advance of the discussion, so that the student has time to prepare herself/himself for the discussion. The student can (and actually is encouraged to) prepare during these 15 minutes written notes that can aid her/him during the discussion. No written material can be used during the preparation of the notes or during the discussion.