What is the best way to learn about RDF / OWL?

Question

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.

Answer 1

• For pragmatic use of RDF, Shelley Power's book Practical RDF is a good start.
• The ESW Wiki is also a good resource
• There's also David Beckett's RDF Resource Guide
• Tim Berners-Lee's notes are always a good read
• There's a bunch of links from the [email protected] mailing list archives

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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

• http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-syntax/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-primer/

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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

Answer 7

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

Answer 8

If you want to learn about building ontologies with OWL, then the pizza ontology tutorial is a good place to start. This link also points to other tutorial resources for building ontologies http://www.co-ode.org/resources/tutorials/