Global Information Systems

CSCI 4350/6350 for Spring 2005.

Course Syllabus

Grading:

• Project – 30%
  • Typically 3 member group.
  • Select one from list we supply or create your own
  • Timeline
    • Form groups and select general topic: first 4 weeks
    • Formal Proposal – first month and a half
    • Agreed-upon concrete set of deliverables – Midpoint
    • Report and demo – last week of class
• Midterm – 25%
  • Will be based on a fixed set of papers chosen from the reading list
  • Questions will be directly from these papers or from direct pertinent references in these papers
• Homework and Quizes – 25%
  • 2 Reviews of seminal and fundamental papers to be presented in class
    • Guidelines for how to do a review is to be handed out before first review is assigned
    • Reviews will be discussed in class with each person requiring to come prepared to class and contribute to the discussion.
  • Small programming / tool demo projects
    • For example, create an ontology in protégé and export it to OWL or RDFS.
• Presentations – 10%
  • 1 presentation about a topic from a general topic/paper list which will be provided on the course page – worth 10%
  • 1 presentation relating to the topic on which your project is based (literature survey) – since there will be a substantial amount of literature survey papers for this should be relatively easy to find. – worth 5%
• Attendance and Participation – 10% 
  • 1 mark will be subtracted for each absence not related to emergency or significant health reason
  • 0.5 marks will be deducted for each time you come to class after 10 minutes)

Lecture Plan

Overall Objective

Learn technologies, standards, and tools related to the Service oriented Architecture and the Semantic Web, and how they are used in developing Web-based applications of global and enterprise scales.

During the course, the following topics will be covered:

• W3C standards (some of it in a quick overview or tutorial style)
  • XML, DTDs, XQuery, XSLT, RDF, RDF(S)
  • Data transformations
  • Specialized Markup
  • Examples
  • FOAF, RSS, Creative commons license embedding
  • Use of XML for data exchange
• Web Search engines
• Architecture
• digital media search, Semantic search
• Basic Tools and Technologies
• Web Server/Jakarta-Tomcat, Protégé; Eclipse
• Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture
• SOAP, WSDL
• Application interoperability
• Understanding the Web
• Hubs/Authorities, structure of the web
• Documents, data and digital media, and services on the Web
• Metadata
• Metadata Classification: Syntactic, structural, semantic metadata
• Information extraction techniques
• KIM, GATE
• Short intro into ML techniques
• Taxonomies, Ontologies
• OWL
• Semantic Web
• creating ontologies, extracting metadata, example applications

• on topics such as: advanced XML, RDF, developing Web Service, Writing/modifying a crawler, using open source search engine

• Example is implementing semantic search and browsing

• Classes will be almost evenly decided between introductory lectures/tutorials, guided discussions, and student presentations