A Hands-on Project for Teaching Semantic Web Technologies in an Undergraduate AI Course

- The latest advances in Semantic Web technologies suggest an accelerating emergence of new exciting Artificial Intelligence applications that are expected to dramatically extend and improve current web services. Yet, these new technologies are outside the scope of undergraduate computer science curriculum. This paper presents our experience with introducing a hands-on project intended to teach Linked Data and Semantic Web as part of an undergraduate Artificial Intelligence course. The project is intended to achieve the following: 1.) Demonstrate the evolution of Knowledge Engineering into Ontological Engineering; 2.) Introduce students to Semantic Web technologies and tools such as ontology editor Protégé, Web Ontology Language (OWL), Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL), and query language SPARQL; 3.) Extend the topic on reasoning into Description Logics and demonstrate the advantages of their inferencing capabilities; 4.) Use OWL and SWRL to compare descriptive and rule-based reasoning frameworks and show how their integration can improve the efficiency and the semantic adequacy of applications; 5.) Illustrate the Linked Data principles in a practical setting. Limited assessment of the pedagogical value of this project based on student learning outcomes suggests that it enhances students’ understanding of the core AI topics, boosts their engagement and interest in the course, but more importantly introduces them to the newest advances in web application development.