Yarmouk University

Faculty of Information Technology and Computer Sciences

Department of Computer Sciences CS691: Special Topics (Semantic Web)
Credit Hours: 3 Prerequisite: none

Course Description:

Semantic Web, XML language, DTD, RDF/RDFS languages, Query languages, SPARQL
and web services.

Course Objectives:
This course will cover introduce students to Semantic Web. By the end of this course,
students should possess a firm grounding in some of the existing Semantic Web technologies
as well as to some of Semantic Web applications.

Learning Outcomes:

Upon completion of this subject students are expected to:

• Know what is the “Semantic Web”?

• Learn some of Semantic Web technologies and applications.

Teaching Methods:
The course will be based on the following activities:

• Lectures
• Case Studies

Evaluation Plan:

Students will be evaluated using the following assessment methods:

Mid Exam 30%

Project, assignments and paper presentation 30%
Final 40%

1
Teaching Materials:

We will adopt material from the web. The following are recommended read-
ings:
• G. Antoniou, F. van Harmelen. “A Semantic Web Primer", MIT Press, 2004.
• D. Fensel, J. Hendler, H. Lieberman. “Spinning the Semantic Web", MIT Press, 2005.
• K. Baclawski, T. Niu. “Ontologies for Bioinformatics", MIT Press, 2006.

Interesting sources of information can be found at:

• The World Wide Web Consortium www.w3.org

• The W3 Schools www.w3schools.com

Topics Covered:
The following is a tentative list of the topics covered in this course:

1. The Semantic Web: Introduction and Motivations

2. Basic XML and XML Processing
3. The Document Type Definition (DTD)
4. XML Schema
5. The Resource Description Framework (RDF)
6. Query Languages (Xpath, Xquery, SPARQL)
7. The Web Ontology Language (OWL)
8. Description Logic
9. The Rule Markup Language (RuleML)
10. Introduction to Web Services and WSDL
11. Introduction to SOAP
12. Applications of the Semantic Web