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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.


DAY 1 (Wednesday):

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 give an optional modeling assignment for practicing concepts covered in the "Protégé-OWL basics" lecture.


DAY 2 (Thursday):

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)
After lunch we discuss various approaches to ontology-driven application development and give attendees the opportunity to explore alternative methods of visualizing ontologies using the Protégé-OWL editor.

The last lecture of the day presents 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 WebProtégé; a lightweight, web-based application to support collaborative ontology editing in a web environment.


DAY 3 (Friday):

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 discuss possible solutions to the modeling assignment introduced on Wednesday.

The last two lectures in the course present various methods for importing data into Protégé-OWL, and give a final overview of the Protégé project's status.