Teaching the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web in general and Semantic Web Services in particular seem to be very elusive concepts. It’s not difficult to understand what the semantic web will do, but if you don’t have an AI background, it’s difficult to know where to start when trying to build a semantic web app/service.

We thought we’d make things easier on programmers that wanted to know more about the semantic web, so we set up a 3 day crash course. The course took place during the last 3 days (7-8-9 July) at the Computer Science Faculty in Bucharest. It was a very interesting experience.

1. During the first day of the course, Stefan Trausan and Vlad Posea from the Computer Science Faculty showed introduced us to the basic concepts of the semantic web. We then got to build an ontology from scratch and build a semtic web crawler that would look for and index some semantic mark-up data. Very interesting stuff.
2. During the second day, it was our turn to take the lead and introduce people to RESTful semantic web services. We talked about web service architecture, authentication and DataPortability. Later on we got to play with a handful of API and we implemented a distributed conversation, much like what uberVU will do starting with September ‘08.
3. Our friend George Aprozeanu from Adobe wrapped up the course during the third day. He showed us some very cool programming techniques for creating MVC apps without any framework whatsoever. Very elegant and subtle.

The course was a success in our opinion, in that attendees left with some basic skills and with a sense of the possibilities of the Semantic Web. Because of this, we plan to make this course permanent at the Computer Science Faculty. We feel that the Semantic Web and new Web technologies in general don’t get the attention they deserve from the academic world in Romania. This is sad, as the Web is definately where the future is.

More info on this course as we make progress towards setting it up permanently.