WP 9: Semantic Web Education

October 2003

Enrico Motta & Arthur StuttThe Open University

Mounia Lalmas & Andrew GravesQueen Mary, University of London

Update on WP9

• Main Activities– Producing final version of educational portal– Integrating educational and main Ontoweb portals– Ontoweb Summer School

• Current state– Work on Ontoweb Educational Portal now finished– The portal remains available for the submission of new

resources– Portal alignment almost complete– We had an extremely successful summer school

• New site design which no longer uses frames• New layout of pages to make them simple and more

legible• New functionality

– An export to XML option;– An export to RDF option.

• URL: http://qmir.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/ontoweb/

Edu Portal version 3

Portal Alignment

• The new export to RDF option fulfills our remit to align the ontologies of the OntoWeb Educational resources portal and the main OntoWeb portal and to share the resources.

• Sharing one-way from the educational to the main portal only– Mechanism for exporting our database in the correct format for ontoweb

portal.

• Extensive collaboration with the University of Karlsruhe who are in charge of the main portal.

• Revised version of the OntoWeb portal ontology now includes the Educational resources ontology.

Current State

• Currently around 100 resources. • Feel free to contribute…. • Remember

– we store only pointers to resources– all these resources will be automatically imported into the main

OntoWeb portal

OntoWeb Summer School

The First European Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web

(SSSW-2003)

was held

21st-26th July 2003 - Cercedilla (Spain)

SSSW-2003 Overview

• The school was held in a Universidad Politécnica de Madrid building in the Sierra de Guadarrama Mountains about 50 km from Madrid.

• 120 requests, 59 students were accepted

• 8 tutors

• 4 invited speakers

• Students mostly in the 2nd year of their PhDs

• From over 20 countries.

Tutors

• Knowledge Representation and Ontologies– Asun Gómez-Pérez & Mike Uschold

• Semantic Web Services– Terry Payne & John Domingue

• Language Technologies for the Semantic Web– Paul Buitelaar & Fabio Ciravegna

• Semantic Web Technologies for Knowledge Management– Hans Akkermans & Steffen Staab

• Structure resulted from specification of appropriate curriculum for semantic web school

• Tutors provide perspectives from a variety of research centres and approaches

Speakers

• Carole Goble (Introduction to the Semantic Web)• Nicola Guarino (Knowledge Representation and Ontologies)• Dieter Fensel (Semantic Web Services) • Richard Benjamins (Semantic Web Technology for Knowledge

Management

Pedagogical Approach

• Theoretical material was presented in a series of 2-3 hour formal sessions augmented by 1 hour talks.

• To avoid a passive learning experience a series of 2-3 hour sessions provided hands-on experience with the tools and techniques covered in the formal sessions

• A mini-project was used to integrate work on the four themes

• Students presented the results of their project work on the final morning with a prize awarded for best paper.

… but it wasn’t all ontolo-slog

Student praise

“The atmosphere of the school was positive and creative, thanks mainly to the organizers”

“Thank you so much for your effort that made a very nice summer school happen. I had a great time there.”

“I wanted to thank you for all, it was really pleasant and fun to attend this summer school”.

“Many thanks to all organizers and tutors! It was a great summer school!”

“It was a high level school! Thanks!”

“Nothing in the world is perfect, but this summer school was really great!”

“Difficult to improve upon excellence!”

“I would just like to thank the organizers for this wonderful summer school”

It was an exciting experience to all participating students to learn the most valuable knowledge about ontologies and semantic web from the prominent researchers and professors. Especially, the hand-on sessions are great for every student. The organization and management are more than perfect. I express my heartfelt thanks to you.

Best Wishes,

Sung-Kook Han

Next Web Generation Group

University of Innsbruck

Professor praise

Lessons Learnt from SSSW-2003

• For future schools we may need to reduce the number of themes.

• While students were happier with the tutorials and talks, most felt that it was important to include hands-on sessions and a mini-project and (despite themselves?) many found these sessions enjoyable.

• However, we need to rethink the time devoted to project work and its position in the week.

• While we intended to use OWL as the main ontology language we found that there were too few tools available.

• We need to have greater integration of the various tools.

OntoWeb Summer School

Web site with teaching material, email addresses, photographs etc.

http://minsky.dia.fi.upm.es/sssw03/