News

• The lectures for a.y. 2022/2023 were held in the first semester (September 27-December 22, 2021).
  The lectures have been streamed online and recorded.

Attending the course

The students who want to attend this course are asked to log in their Google account at studenti.uniroma1.it and access Google Classroom; then, students can enroll in the Knowledge Representation and Semantic Technologies course directly using this link or using the code "xdp2kqu". The recordings of lectures and the teaching material are posted on the above Google Classroom course.

Objectives

The goal of the course is to provide an introduction to knowledge representation and reasoning, and to focus on the current semantic technologies that are strongly based on knowledge representation and reasoning. In particular, the families of class-based and rule-based knowledge representaton formalisms will be presented, and reasoning techniques for such formalisms will be analyzed. Then, the course will introduce the standard semantic technologies based on the above knowledge representation formalisms: in particular, the RDF language and the OWL language. Finally, the course will briefly describe the usage of machine learning techniques over knowledge bases.

Program

1. Introduction to knowledge representation
2. Class-based formalisms
   • Description Logics
   • Reasoning in Description Logics
   • Description Logics vs. relational databases
3. Rule-based formalisms
   • Brief introduction to logic programming
   • Datalog
   • Reasoning in Datalog
   • Datalog vs. Description Logics
   • Datalog extensions
   • Datalog with negation
   • Answer Set Programming (ASP)
   • Reasoning in ASP
   • Comparison with SQL
4. Semantic technologies
   • Semantic Web
   • RDF, RDFS, SPARQL
   • Linked data
   • Ontologies
   • OWL
   • OWL profiles
   • Reasoning in OWL profiles
   • Query answering in OWL profiles
   • Building an OWL ontology
   • Knowledge graphs
   • Machine learning over knowledge graphs

Lectures

The lectures for a.y. 2022/2023 were held in the first semester (September 27-December 22, 2022).
The lectures have been streamed online and recorded.

Exam

Remark: to pass the exam, every student has to present a practical project (homework) besides passing the written exam (see the next section on homework assignments).

The written exam is a set of exercises and questions about all the course topics.

Exam dates (the exact dates will be published as soon as possible):

• January 12, 2023
• February 3, 2023
• June 2023
• July 2023
• September 2023

As usual, before every exam date, students MUST reserve for the exam on Infostud. The reservation deadline is 4 days before the exam date.

Text of past exams:

• January 12, 2022
• February 1, 2022
• June 16, 2022
• July 5, 2022
• September 12, 2022

Homework assignments

Every student MUST present a practical project besides passing the written exam. The project consists of creating and managing datasets/knowledge bases through KR-based tools.

Every project consists of:

1. downloading, installing and learning how to use a knowledge-based system, e.g.:
   • Protege
   • DLV
   • Jena
   • Virtuoso
   • Stardog
   • Mastro (Protege plug-in)
   • Ontop (Protege plug-in)
   (other tools/systems dealing with RDF, OWL, or Datalog/ASP can be used as well, the interested students have to contact prof. Rosati for more information)
2. building and querying a dataset for the above chosen system. In alternative, it is possible to use an existing dataset. In both cases, the students must be aware of the structure and content of the dataset and be able to modify and query it in a proper way.

The student(s) must show the usage of such a tool during a brief presentation.
The presentation of the project can be given during the academic year 2022/2023 (please send an email to prof. Rosati to agree on a date).

Schedule and contents of past lectures

Link to the website of the 2021/2022 edition of this course