View Courses > Introduction to Implementing Ontologies in OWL

Course Description

NWeHealth and The University of Manchester Bio-Health Informatics Group invite you to participate in their internationally renowned two-day tutorial on Ontology engineering and OWL.

This two-day introductory ‘hands-on’ workshop aims to provide attendees with both the theoretical foundations and practical experience to begin building OWL ontologies using the latest version of the Protégé-OWL tools (Protege4).

This tutorial will cover the main conceptual parts of OWL through the hands-on building of an ontology of pizzas and their ingredients. A series of exercises take attendees through the process of conceptualizing the toppings found on a pizza; the entry of this classification into the Protégé environment; the description of many types of pizza. All this is set in the context of using automatic reasoning to check the consistency of the growing ontology and to use the reasoner to make queries about pizzas. Since 2003 this tutorial, in various forms, has been given over 20 times and been attended by hundreds of budding ontologists.

The tutorial is very much a ‘hands-on’ experience. By the end of the tutorial you will have gained sufficient experience in order to model knowledge using the Protégé software. Short talks included in both days introduce the theoretical aspects of ontology design.

 

Aims

The aims of the tutorial are to:

• understand the use of ontologies
• understand statements written in OWL;
• understand the role of automatic reasoning in ontology building;
• build an ontology and use a reasoner to draw inferences based on that ontology;
• gain experience in the Protégé 4 ontology building environment;
• gain insight into how OWL can play a role in semantic metadata.
• Learn the basic principles of OWL based ontologies using styles developed at The University of Manchester and in the Semantic Web Best Practice Working Party
• Gain hands-on experience with ontology development using the Protégé-OWL tools
• Learn how to use the expressive power of OWL and to take advantage of its inferencing capabilities to build robust, reusable models
• Learn about knowledge acquisition techniques and use them to model a subject domain
• Be introduced to the skills needed to participate in the growing community of users/developers of OWL 
  

Location
The course is to be held in the Atlas Room 1, Kilburn Building in the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester.  This is building 39 on the university campus map.  Directions to the University from airport, train stations and by car can be found at: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/visitors/travel/directions/

Equipment and Software

It is recommended for the practical sessions that participants work in small groups of 2 or 3. There will be enough laptops available on location to have 2 to a machine. You are welcome to bring your own machine, but we must stress that software be installed as per instructions.

Software installation and requirements

PLEASE NOTE: Laptops and software are provided at the tutorial; however should you wish to bring your own computer, please could you install the following software. The tutorial will be more meaningful if you are able to follow along with the software and experiment afterwards. To do so, download Protege4Alpha from http://protege.stanford.edu/download/registered.html#p4.  If you do not have Graphviz installed, you should also install it in order for the OwlViz tool in Protege to work properly - http://www.graphviz.org.

Speakers

This tutorial has been developed by the Bio-Health Informatics Group at the University of Manchester (http://www.co-ode.org) and will be delivered by various members of the group. 

Accommodation

The closest places to stay are Manchester Business School and the IBIS Hotel, Charles Street.

 

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