ISWC 2022 A Beginner’s Guide to Reasoning: How to reason your way to better data

The International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2022

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A Beginner’s Guide to Reasoning: How to reason your way to better data

Reasoning has become an increasingly valued tool in the semantic web space, and yet to many it's still a black box solution. Perhaps more tragically, despite the explosion of its development in recent years, many in the space still perceive it as a slow, cumbersome, and ultimately impractical technology, which is far from true today. Whether you’re looking to harness reasoning for your own goals, or to peek behind the curtains of someone else’s solution, now is your time to learn. Get hands on with a reasoning engine in this interactive walkthrough: A Beginner’s Guide to Reasoning. You’ll come away understanding the power of reasoning, what it can add to your data, and the fundamentals of how to apply it yourself. With technology in this space running away, there’s never been a better time to learn! This tutorial will touch on the basics of SPARQL, OWL, and Datalog, before diving into reasoning at a technical level. Each participant will come away having built a reasoning solution for themselves, guided along the way by knowledge engineers and subject experts. No prior knowledge is required.

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Why come to this tutorial?

Reasoning is one of the most powerful tools available to those utilizing the semantic web but it has been consistently misunderstood and undervalued as a result of a difficult history. For many years it struggled to bear fruit as a slow technology that failed to meet expectations, and understandably garnered an appropriate reputation. Today however, this has all changed.

Last year Prof. Ian Horrocks was awarded the Lovelace Medal for his work on reasoning systems, work that propelled reasoning out from being a fanciful daydream and into reality, now capable of delivering on the promises of the past. This is the technology that we bring you. Fast, stable, and with absolute correctness, reasoning is being adopted more and more in industry. The time has come for this tool to be widely understood by the community at large, not just as a shallow awareness, but as a deep technical familiarity.

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Level: Beginner to intermediate

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The tutorial will cover the following topics:

8pm CST (local time)

·      How to write and run a SPARQL query

·      The importance of reasoning and its application

·      How to write and understand an OWL axiom

Short break

10pm CST

·      How to write and understand a Datalog rule

·      How to apply and verify the rules they write

·      The extent opportunities with reasoning

·      How to create a solution that relies on reasoning

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Each topic will first be demonstrated to the students so they can copy an ideal example and see the intended results in an informal teacher-student format. Then they will be given the opportunity to apply their new learned skills without immediate direction, writing rules and queries by themselves. If at any point a participant requires some assistance, the lecturers will be on hand to help, whether that requires a minor hint, a refresh of the material, or gentle guidance. Anyone of any skill level should leave this class knowing what reasoning is and how to implement it, so individual support is flexible depending on the needs of the group. No prior experience is required as we will run through the process step-by-step, start to finish.

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Presenter:

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Valerio Cocchi, Senior Knowledge Engineer at Oxford Semantic Technologies

Valerio joined OST in June 2018, and has since risen to the role of Senior Knowledge Engineer. Having focused on graph reasoning throughout his career, and regularly presenting tutorials and webinars for the education of others, Valerio is the ideal candidate to impart knowledge onto the next generation of reasoning students. He graduated from the University of Oxford, having read Mathematics.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/valerio-cocchi-162520b9

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Software and other requirements for attendees:

·       Windows 8+, Mac OS 10.14+, Centos 7+, Ubuntu16.04+

·       RDFox downloaded

·       An RDFox license, free for attendees

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