Linked Data and other Semantic Web technologies are used in a variety of organisations for projects large and small. They are a key feature in both government open data initiatives and enterprise-wide data integration systems for internal use. In this course, you'll learn about the building blocks of the Semantic Web and how to use them, including how to model your data in RDF, integrate with third-party and OpenData sources, and how to enter and run SPARQL queries. You'll hear about how these technologies are used today, and have a chance to try them out in the hands-on portions of the classes.
Classes for 2016
The Linked Data course runs on and .
- The Semantic Web: an Overview
Taught by Kal Ahmed.
The Semantic Web is a set of standards and best practices for sharing data and the semantics of that data over the web for use by applications. What are the standards? What are the best practices? What does it mean to share semantics along with data, and how can that make the data more useful? How do applications use data from across the web?
In this class, we'll look at the high-level answers to these questions, take a tour of the technology and the acronyms, and see how they all fit together before the day's remaining speakers dig deeper into the practical use of these technologies.
- Introduction to Linked Data
Taught by Kal Ahmed.
The infrastructure of the world wide web can do more than deliver documents for people to read off of their screens: it can also deliver data for applications to use. The principles of Linked Data have laid a foundation that has made it possible for governments, media, and e-commerce retailers to publish data on the web without depending on custom-built APIs. This class will show you how to take advantage of these principles to consume available data and to publish it yourself.
Among other things, we'll learn about popular sets of linked data that you can use, how to create links between datasets, how to mint good URIs, HTTP issues, and how to take gradual steps toward good linked data publishing.
- Introduction to SPARQL and SPARQL Update
SPARQL is the standard W3C query language for semantic web applications. It brings together the features of a number of RDF query languages into one method for extracting information from data represented in RDF, whether small datasets or large.
The next wave of SPARQL standardization is currently underway to add features that are useful for publishing data and also to add mechanisms to update and manage RDF data over the web.
This session will provide a solid grounding in SPARQL. After demonstrating how powerful some very simple SPARQL queries can be, we will take a practical approach to looking at the key features of SPARQL 1.0 and 1.1, and then explore the principles underpinning the SPARQL query language.
Following this, we will introduce the features of SPARQL for update and management of data using web protocols. SPARQL Update is a language for modifying RDF data and SPARQL HTTP Update provides for RESTful update of a collection of RDF graphs.
- RDF principles and modelling
Taught by Philip Fennell.
This session will look at the practical means by which you can generate and acquire RDF datasets from relational data sources, XML, content enrichment and the Linked Open Data Cloud. We will discover best practice in RDF data modelling by utilising established design patterns and how they can be applied to real-world modelling problems. We will also look at publishing metadata in RDFa and how the worlds of XML and RDF can meet to help build more compelling data-driven applications.
- Practical Implementation (Panel Session)
This panel session with all speakers will concentrate on the practical aspects of what is stopping more people from implementing and using Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies.