Monday, 5/21/2007
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Level: Intermediate

In this tutorial we illustrate the practical steps needed to build an example semantic web application. This approach grounds semantic web concepts in terms of the problems they can solve, and illustrates some of the ways in which they can be applied. The tutorial is based around a case study of building an e-commerce service in the broadcast music domain. This service provides an integrated view of information from multiple sources, using both RDF and OWL. We show how the data itself, and the underlying conceptual models, can be made visible to different constituencies of end-users though browsing and report generation tools, and exported to other services.

The example is developed using the Jena open source toolkit. We will show how to import data and ontologies into an RDF store, how to use rules and OWL inference to enrich the imported data, how to use (SPARQL) queries to extract the data for presentation through user interface tools or over web service links. We illustrate the main development steps required at each stage.

The material assumes some familiarity with semantic web technologies, though detailed technical knowledge of the representations is not required. Several examples will be presented as Java code fragments, so some familiarity with Java and associated technologies is expected.

Dr. Ian Dickinson is a Senior Research Engineer at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Bristol, UK.  He is a member of development team responsible for the Jena Semantic Web Platform, a widely used open-source toolkit for programming semantic web applications in Java. He has over eighteen years research experience at HP Labs, where his current research interests include semantic web applications, user interfaces and software agents.