A Two Day Introduction to the Web of Data

The contents here are for a 2 day course written by Talis.

The two day agenda is designed to take people with a desire to learn about the Semantic Web, Web of Data and Linked Data from a position of no prior knowledge to the point where they can start practical work with these technologies.

During the two day agenda we cover RDF, Data Modelling, RDF Schema (vocabularies, ontologies) and SPARQL through a number of presented sessions and hands-on practical tasks.

The course is technical in nature and works well for Data Managers, Curators, Statisticians and Information Architects as well as Developers or Software Engineers.

The authors of this course are Rob Styles, Leigh Dodds, Ian Davis, Tim Hodson and Keith Alexander.

Day One

Day one of the course starts with introductions to the Web of Data and RDF, and leads on to data modelling for the Web using RDF. After lunch the practicalities of picking URIs as names for things is covered before going on to learnt the Turtle syntax for writing RDF. We go on to cover RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, RDF/JSON and RDFa before diving into RDF Schema (vocabularies and ontologies). Day one is a full day with students finishing the day with a good grasp of how RDF is different to other data models and how to make best use of it as well as an introduction to several serialisations for RDF and RDF Schema.

10:00Welcome

10:30What is the Web of Data

11:00RDF - A Data Format for the Web

11:30Data Modelling in RDF - Modelling without context

12:30Lunch

13:00URIs - Naming Things on the Web

13:30Turtle - A Human-readable Notation for RDF

14:30RDF/XML - RDF written down using XML (and other things)

15:00RDF Schema - Describing the Structure of Data in RDF

16:00close

Day Two

Day two is made up of large sessions. With the core introductions covered in day one we dive into using tools of the students' choice to convert some existing data (A CSV file) into RDF. Students in runs of this course have used various tools including scripting languages, XSLT and Microsoft Excel formulae to do this conversion. Once some data has been converted we learn about triple store technologies by looking at the capabilities of the Talis Platform and then, networking restrictions allowing, publish data to a store using curl. The afternoon then builds on students' understanding of the RDF model to develop an understanding of the SPARQL query language and tackle a number of practical search questions.

10:00Recap

10:30Converting Existing Data into RDF

12:00Linked Data - Publishing Data to the Web

12:30Lunch

13:00The Talis Platform - Online Storage for RDF

13:30Publishing Your Data - Using a Triple Store

14:00SPARQL - A Query Language for RDF

16:00close

Many of these sessions are hands-on practical exercises designed to demonstrate techniques, common problems and to help students develop their understanding beyond the presented material.

A HTML version of the slides can be viewed here.