Learning semantic web technologies with the web-based SPARQLTrainer

The success of the Semantic Web in research, technology and standardization communities has resulted in a large variety of different approaches, standards and techniques. This diversity and heterogeneity often involve an increasing difficulty of becoming acquainted with Semantic Web technologies. In this work, we present the SPARQLTrainer approach for educating novices in semantic technologies in a playful way. With SPARQLTrainer educators can devise a SPARQL course by defining a number of exercises either generically or for a specific domain. Learners can complete courses by stepwise answering questions of increasing complexity. These questions usually require the learner to build a SPARQL query for querying a certain knowledge base and using certain SPARQL features. The SPARQL queries created by a learner are compared with example solutions given by the instructor. This comparison takes possible variations into account and gives specific feedback to the learner.