The Protégé-OWL Short Course provides an introduction to ontology development in OWL, both from a theoretical standpoint and from a practical standpoint through hands-on use of the Protégé platform. The course also emphasizes how to use OWL ontologies, and other semantic technologies like SWRL, to build semantic applications with examples from real-world use cases.


Quick Links: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3


DAY 1 (Monday):

On the first day of the course during the Ontology 101 lecture, we:

• define ontologies
• talk about why you might want to build one
• outline the steps in the development process
• list common development pitfalls and give tips for avoiding them

Right after lunch we introduce the Semantic Web and dive into hands-on use of the Protégé-OWL editor to facilitate understanding of basic OWL topics such as:

• classes, properties, and individuals
• class and property axioms
• reasoning

At the end of the day, we present Collaborative Protégé; an extension of the Protégé platform to support:

• collaborative ontology editing
• annotation of ontology components and changes
• proposal and voting mechanisms
• discussion threads and live chat

During this session, we also demonstrate WebProtege; a lightweight, web-based application to support collaborative ontology editing in a web environment.


DAY 2 (Tuesday):

The morning of the second day is again hands-on and focuses on advanced OWL and reasoning topics such as:

• more on properties (inverse, functional, transitive, symmetric)
• domain and range
• union, intersection, negation
• existential, universal, and cardinality restrictions
• multiple inheritance
• necessary and sufficient conditions
• closure axioms
• open world vs. closed world assumption
• value partitions
• OWL modeling patterns (best practices)

In the afternoon, we switch gears to cover a number of Protégé extensions that assist users with various tasks in the lifecycle of ontology development. Attendees will be introduced to:

• alternative methods of visualizing ontologies
• ontology merging and mapping
• methods for importing data into Protégé-OWL

DAY 3 (Wednesday):

Hands-on work resumes on the morning of the third day with a session on the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). Attendees will gain experience with the SWRLTab; an environment within the Protégé-OWL editor allowing for graphical creation, editing, and execution of SWRL rules.

Following the SWRL session is an introduction to querying ontologies using both the SPARQL query language and SQWRL (Semantic Query-Enhanced Web Rule Language). Advantages and disadvantages of both query languages will be discussed.

After lunch we present how one goes about building applications with, or developing plug-ins for the Protégé platform. This is a high-level lecture that is *not* targeted towards software developers. Rather, we want attendees to come away with an understanding of what is possible in terms of extensions to meet individual workflow needs.

Attendees will also have the opportunity to hear lectures from a research scientist and an associate professor about how they have used Protégé, ontologies, and OWL in real world applications.

Last but certainly not least, we demo the next-generation Protégé-OWL editor (Protégé 4.0 Beta) and discuss what is coming in OWL 2.0.