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What references offer a good summary/tutorial for using RDF/OWL? There seem to be enough tools (Protege, Topbraid, Jena, etc.) that knowing the syntax of the markup languages is not necessary, but knowing the concepts is, of course, still critical.

I'm working through the w3c documents (particularly the RDF Primer) but I'd like to find other resources/techniques to use as well.

Mark Cidade
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rcreswick
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10 Answers10

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A very good introduction to the semantic web in comparison to object-oriented languages is this document from W3C: A Semantic Web Primer for Object-Oriented Software Developers. It helped me clarify a lot of things from the beginning.

Panos
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  • Note to other readers -- all the answers as of this writing have been helpful, but I found the link in Pano's suggestion to be the best for me, at this point. Please read and vote on the other answers too, they are all good. – rcreswick Oct 24 '08 at 17:32
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Mark Cidade
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8

I've found experimenting with SPARQL to be a very helpful way of getting a grip on RDF. Reading about it is great, but trying to model a few things and querying other people's models made it "click" for me.

Some more resources:

  • Planet RDF (rss aggregating several rdf/semweb blogs) is often informative
  • Arc (rdf/sparql library for PHP) is great and easy to get started with if you come from a scripting background
  • Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist (book) contains a good number of practical examples and motivates the need for RDF, RDFS, and OWL and is (in my opinion) very readable.
  • The tutorials with many of the libraries are good resources too
allclaws
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5

If you want to learn about building ontologies with OWL, then the pizza ontology tutorial from this book is a good place to start.

Jay Rainey
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fgibson
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There is a Software Engineering Radio interview with Jim Hendler dating from early November, 2008, that discusses the state of the art in that area. His book, Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL, has gotten high marks for its practical coverage of the area.

Chasing links from that interview led me to Protege, an active open-source project at Stanford University.

technomalogical
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joel.neely
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I posted a series of informative articles and tutorials a while back, which may be helpful. The series starts very basic concepts and builds progressively.

Introduction to the Semantic Web Vision and Technologies - Part 1 - Overview This is the first of a series of articles written exclusively to help you understand the Semantic Web vision and technologies. In this part, we introduce the Semantic Web vision set forth by Tim Berners-Lee. We also took a look at the famous layer cake diagram illustrating key technologies that make it possible.

Part 2 - Foundations In this part, we munch around the bottom of the layer cake with a few important points about Unicode, URI, and XML - - three foundational technologies that permeate the existing Web and that are especially relevant to the emerging Semantic Web.

Part 3 - The Resource Description Framework We put Unicode, URI, and XML to use as we take our next step up the Semantic Web layer cake in a review of the Resource Description Framework (RDF). At the same time, we take the visual RDF/OWL editor, Altova SemanticWorks, for a test drive.

Part 4 - Protégé 101 (screencast tutorial) We reach an important milestone in the series - crossing a great divide between familiar technologies such as XML, Unicode, URI, and RDF to the Web Ontology Language (OWL). This is where things really start to get interesting. (Sorry for the annoying click sounds.)

Part 5 - Building OWL Ontologies Using Protege 4 (screencast tutorial) We're still using Protege, but this time working with the new ALPHA version and getting deeper into concepts.

Apologies for not having completed the series to a good finale, but I got slammed. More recently, I wrote a couple of posts on the Linked Data side of things. Though not specifically about RDF/OWL, they are highly related and may also be of interest to those interested in RDF/OWL. In order from most recent to last:

Cody Burleson
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For OWL, check out the OWL 2 specification, e.g. the following documents, which also provide a lot of examples.

Kaarel
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Bob DuCharme's blog post, Adding metadata value with Pellet, is a nice practical place to start with OWL: http://www.snee.com/bobdc.blog/2008/12/adding-metadata-value-with-pel.html

Kendall Clark
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This is a nice video about the semantic web: http://vimeo.com/1062481?pg=embed&sec=1062481

tuinstoel
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I've found the linkeddatatools tutorial is easy to understand the basics.

http://www.linkeddatatools.com/semantic-web-basics

Hirosh Wickramasuriya
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