Technical Data

• Advanced Bachelor or Master/Diploma in Applied Computer Science or Information Systems (Wirtschaftsinformatik)
• Prerequisites/Vorbedingungen: Basic Knowledge in e.g. XML and/or RDF
• 6 ECTS
• Number of participants: max. 10
• Language: German and english are allowed. Reading of english text/documentation is required.

Time Schedule

• first meeting at the beginning of the semester:
  Monday 2.11. 14h c.t. SR 2.101, IFI: First Meeting
  Assignment of topics and papers.
• Nov/Dec: preparation of case studies and presentations, individual meetings
• Jan/Feb: presentations.
  

Contents

There is a lot of data available in the Web and in the Semantic Web. Web data is usually provided in a human-readable form of Web pages (including forms, the so-called Deep Web), while it cannot be processd in a database-style way by users. Data Extraction, e.g. from the CIA World Factbook or from Wikipedia, is thus a neverending "hot topic". Apart from pattern-based approaches, also Natural Language Processing Approaches are used.

The Semantic Web (cf. lecture Semantic Web) makes some attempts to provide, extend and/or annotate Web Data towards a machine-readable way. For this, the RDF data format is used, together with the OWL ontology language for describing metadata.

Potential Topics

• WebScrapping via Browser Automation with Selenium
  Comment: Evaluate, do a case study, and describe. Neither XML nor RDF knowledge required, but practical competence obviously needed.
  
• WebScrapping with OXPath/Diadem (Oxford Univ.)
  Comment: Evaluate, do a case study, and describe. Based on XPath/XML. No RDF knowledge required, but XML/XPath knowledge required.
  
• Pagoda (Oxford Univ.) : PAGOdA exploits a hybrid approach to answering conjunctive queries over OWL 2 ontologies that combines a datalog reasoner with a fully-fledged OWL 2 reasoner. Pagoda Project
• A theoretical paper that presents a true algebra over RDF data.
  Leonid Libkin, Juan L. Reutter, Domagoj Vrgoc: Trial for RDF: adapting graph query languages for RDF data. PODS 2013: 201-212
• The google maps and google street maps APIs.
  Comment: Evaluate, do a case study and describe.
• RDF Annotations in HTML: RDF-A
• to be extended

Note: Papers can be found via the DBLP http://www.dblp.org (originally, DBLP meant "Databases and Logic Programming", but by now it covers all topics in Computer Science), or simply by searching for the paper title with google (this often yields the pdf directly). A list of other papers of the same authors can then be found via DBLP.

Form of the Seminar

The intention of the seminar is to get an overview of the state of the art in data integration from the Web and background data management.

For each topic, the following has to be done:

• a written tutorial-style paper that gives an overview of an approach,
• evaluate some tools, write a report (installation, functionality, usability, ...) [optionally german or english]
• prepare an illustrative medium-size case study using one or more tools (optionally: comparatively)
• a presentation giving the tutorial and showing a demo of how to use it (about 90 minutes incl. discussion; optionally german or english).