TIES4520 Semantic Technologies for Developers (5–7 cr)

Specified course description:
Semantic technology leverages artificial intelligence to simulate how people understand language and process information. It uses formal semantics to give meaning to the disparate and raw data that surrounds us. Semantic Technology is designed to standardize and support interoperability and integration of information content and capabilities (services) of Web-based systems and components at local and global scale. As a software technology semantic technology encodes meanings separately from data and from application code to enable machines to understand, share and reason with them at execution time. This course provides practical introduction on storing, querying, merging and reasoning with the metadata and ontologies for the semantic applications; as well as covers aspects of semantic programming and Linked Data. At the same time, the course addresses the challenge related to the Web of Things where all the things are interconnected and interoperate with each other regardless of whether a thing is a real world object, a digital entity or human. Following the vision of Everything-as-a-Service, in addition to a traditional GUI (where a user of applications and services is assumed to be a human), the course concerns interfaces needed if a user of the application happens to be some other application, service, device or any other thing. Such Everything-to-Everything interfaces in addition to the traditional service APIs have to enable understanding among interacting entities, which requires either sharing common ontology or the support for the ontology alignment process followed by semantically enhanced interaction. Thus, course will review available techniques and tools for practical design of Semantic Web Services as well.