The following tutorials will be offered on the first day (July 15th, 2007) of the 10th International Protégé Conference:

Tutorial content subject to change. Contact the conference organizers with questions (protege-conf-organizers AT lists DOT stanford DOT edu).

• How to Build and Maintain Useful Ontologies (Barry Smith)
  
  This tutorial will provide an overview of what we have learned from recent work, especially in the biomedical domain, regarding practices of ontology building. We will focus not on tools and implementations, but rather on the steps needed to create coherent ontology content. Topics to be dealt with will include:
  
  
  1. Basics of ontology building -- How to formulate terms, definitions, axioms.
  2. Some ontology success stories -- The role of annotations; how to make ontologies work successfully with instance-data in real-world contexts.
  3. Ontology cooperation -- How to resolve problems where ontologies overlap.
  4. Ontology terminology -- How the different disciplinary groups in ontology development and application can communicate with each other when they use different terminologies?
  5. Ontology evolution -- How to improve ontologies, and how to keep track of improvements in useful ways.
  6. Ontology evaluation -- How can we prove that high-quality ontologies bring real benefits? What are examples of successful use cases.
  
  
• OWL Tutorial (Alan Rector, Olivier Dameron, Nick Drummond, Matthew Horridge)
  
  OWL is the W3C standard ontology language for the Semantic Web, and Protégé-OWL the most widely used editing tool for OWL. This three-part tutorial introduces OWL ontology development with Protégé-OWL, presents the majors features of the OWL-DL languages, and explains how to leverage these features for performing advanced reasoning tasks. This will be a "hands-on" adaptation and extension of the famous Protégé-OWL pizza tutorial. The three parts are in continuity, but intermediate resources will be provided so that participants can attend only the second, the third, or the second and third parts depending on their level of expertise.
  
  The first part of the tutorial covers the basic language elements of OWL (classes, properties, and individuals) and shows how they can be edited with Protégé-OWL. The goal of this session is to demonstrate how to create the various elements of a pizza ontology and how to structure this ontology. The intended audience is users not familiar with the Protégé-OWL editor or with the OWL language.
  
  The second part of the tutorial introduces the semantics of the OWL language constructs. We will explore more complex OWL class descriptions by showing how different types of restrictions can be used to enhance the logical meaning of classes, after which we will discuss the important notion of primitive and defined classes. The goal of this session is to demonstrate how to use the richness of the OWL language both for providing an accurate description of a domain knowledge and for using this knowledge in order to make the development and maintenance of the ontology easier and safer. The intended audience comprises those who attended the first part and those who want to have an introduction to the semantics of the OWL language.
  
  The third part of the tutorial introduces a more advanced exploitation of the reasoning power of OWL. We will cover the open world assumption and compare class and instance-based reasoning. The intended audience comprises those who attended the second part and those who want to get an in-depth understanding of the capabilities of OWL reasoning.
  
  
• SWRLTab Tutorial (Martin O'Connor)
  
  This tutorial will provide an in depth look at the SWRLTab, a development environment for working with Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules in Protégé-OWL. The tutorial will provide an introduction to the SWRL language. Hands-on sessions will cover the authoring of rules using the SWRL Editor and the execution of rules using the SWRLJessTab. The set of libraries provided by the SWRLTab will also be covered. These libraries can be used in SWRL rules and include collections of mathematical, string, and temporal operators, in addition to operators that can be used to effectively turn SWRL into a query language.
  
  The target audience member is an existing Protégé-OWL user. Attendance at the OWL Tutorial or previous familiarity with basic OWL concepts are minimal requirements.
  
  More information on this tutorial
  
  
• Ontology Visualization (Jennifer Vendetti)
  
  This tutorial will focus on several Protégé plug-ins that have been developed specifically for the purpose of visualizing ontologies. The first portion of the tutorial will be a hands-on walk-through of the graph widget tutorial that is available on the Protégé Web site. The graph widget is a custom slot widget plug-in that allows users to graphically create and populate instances of classes. It is very useful as a) an alternative to Protégé Forms for entering instance data, b) as a way to visualize networks of instances, and c) as a way to visualize relationships between instances. The graph widget can be used both in the Protégé-Frames and Protégé-OWL editing environments.
  
  The second portion of the tutorial will be a demonstration of the OntoViz, OWLViz, Jambalaya, and TGVizTab tab plug-ins. If time permits at the end of the tutorial, there will also be a demonstration of a new visualization plug-in called the Impact & Alignment Tab, which is a work in progress and will be released (hopefully) in the fall. The target audience for this tutorial are Protégé users with little exposure to the existing visualization plug-ins that are currently available. If users plan to follow the hands-on portion of the tutorial, basic experience with navigating the Protégé user interface will be assumed. Attendees should know how to perform rudimentary tasks such as opening projects and creating new classes, slots, and instances.
  
  More information on this tutorial
  
  
• JessTab & JessAgentTab Tutorial (Henrik Eriksson, Karl-Heinz Krempels)
  
  The first 2.5 hours of this tutorial will introduce the JessTab extension, which enables the use of the Java Expert System Shell (Jess) under Protégé. The tutorial will cover basic Jess programming, rule-based reasoning with Jess under Protégé, and the use of Jess for managing Protégé ontologies and knowledge bases. Furthermore, the tutorial will address the mapping of instances in Protégé knowledge bases to Jess facts and use of the JessTab with both Protégé-Frames and Protégé-OWL. The tutorial will exemplify practical uses of Jess together with Protégé and discuss common design patterns. The tutorial will demonstrate how to install Jess and the JessTab and how to interact with the JessTab. The target audience is developers interested in combining ontologies and reasoning. No prior knowledge of Jess or the JessTab is required.
  
  The last 30 minutes of this tutorial will present the JessAgentTab and is focused on a four stage development process of agent-based applications. In this process, Protégé's main role is the knowledge representation integration among the different tools used in each stage, but also ontology modeling, knowledge acquisition, problem solving method development, and code generation and export to the target technology (agent technology, Web services, etc.). The first stage covers domain analysis and requirements specification with the help of well-established tools in the domain of discourse. The second stage addresses knowledge engineering: ontology modeling and knowledge acquisition with the help of core Protégé functionality. The problem solving method (PSM) is developed/implemented with the help of the JessTab (Henrik Eriksson) in stage three. The last stage covers code generation and export of the ontology (TBox, ABox) and PSM into a JessAgent. The JessAgent is a generic rule-based agent with FIPA (Foundation of Intelligent and Physical Agents) interaction capabilities and an embedded Jess (Java Expert System Shell) rule engine for reasoning. The target audience is developers interested in combining ontologies, reasoning, and agent-based application development. No prior knowledge of Jess, JessAgent, the JessTab, or the JessAgentTab is required.
  
  More information on this tutorial
  
  
• Application Development with Protégé (Timothy Redmond)
  
  This tutorial will address the issue of developing plug-ins and applications with Protégé. It will start with a description of the Protégé Plug-in Framework and describe how the plug-in framework can be used to add capabilities to the Protégé system. We will cover all of the existing plug-in types. We will describe what is necessary to develop each type of plug-in and how each plug-in type extends the Protégé application. We will follow-up the discussion of Protégé plug-ins with a discussion of an alternative paradigm of development in Protégé: the development of standalone Protégé applications. We will see that in many cases, there is a natural evolution from the development of Protégé plug-ins to the development of standalone Protégé applications. We will describe the architectural design issues in application development and analyze some real deployed applications that have been built with Protégé. The target audience includes both Java programmers and non-programmers.