Curso UNS "FOUNDATIONS OF RDF DATABASES"

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Universidad Nacional del Sur. Curso de posgrado del Departamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación 

FOUNDATIONS OF RDF DATABASES

Prof. Dr. Claudio Gutiérrez, Universidad de Chile

Objectives:

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a metadata W3C standard for describing information on the Web. The motivation behind the development of RDF was, to borrow the words Tim Berners-Lee used for the Semantic Web,"to have a common and minimal language to enable to map large quantities of existing data onto it so that the data can be analyzed in ways never dreamed of by its creators." To bring to reality this vision, the processing of RDF data
at big scale must be viable. This challenge amounts essentially to develop the theory and practice of RDF databases. In this short course, we will present the current state of the theory of RDF databases, from the perspective of the work of our (Santiago, Chile) group. We will emphasize the presentation of open problems and possible lines of research.


Syllabus:

  1. Introduction: Knowledge Representation, Metadata and the chal lenges of massive processing on the Web: XML, RDF and OWL.
  2. The RDF data model (from a database perspective [4]). Stan  dard W3C specfication and its core. A minimal and complete   fragment.
  3. Basic theory of querying RDF and RDFS data. The pattern   matching paradigm for querying RDF [3]. Basic Notions.
  4. Challenges of querying RDF from a graph database perspective   [1, 2]. The problem. The state of the art.
  5. The formal semantics of SPARQL [5]. A formal compositional   semantics for SPARQL. Comparison with current W3C specifica  tion.
  6. Complexity and expresiveness of SPARQL ([5], Tech. Report.)   What is the expressiveness of SPARQL?: Relational Algebra.


Lectures:

24-28 November 2008
Depto. Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional del Sur
Av. Alem 1253
Bahía Blanca


Methodology:

This short course is targeted at graduate students interested in developments in Logic, Knowledge Representation and Databases (motivated undergraduate of the last years of the career are very welcome as well).
  The expected background of prospective students is basic logic and databases. The evaluation consists of a small project that the student should develop on some topic presented in the course. Working language of lectures and sessions could be either english or spanish. (Students need to be able to read english to work on papers.)


References:

  1. R. Angles and C. Gutierrez. Survey of Graph Database Models.   In ACM Computing Surveys, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2008.
  2. R. Angles and C. Gutierrez. Querying RDF Data from a Graph   Database Perspective. In 2nd European Semantic Web Confer ence, ESWC, 2005.
  3. C. Gutierrez, C. Hurtado, and A. O. Mendelzon. Foundations of   Semantic Web Databases. In ACM Symposium on Principles of   Database Systems, PODS, 2004.
  4. S. Muñoz, J. Perez, and C. Gutierrez. Minimal Deductive Systems   for RDF. In 4th European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC,   2007.
  5. J. Perez, M. Arenas, and C. Gutierrez. The Semantics and Com plexity of SPARQL. In 5th International Semantic Web Confer ence, ISWC, 2006.


Contact:

Pablo Fillottrani
Deptartamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional del Sur
prf@cs.uns.edu.ar