We will formalize a domain by defining classes and properties of those classes; we will define individuals and assert properties about them, and reason about these classes and individuals to the degree permitted by the formal semantics of the OWL language.

In this project, we will be describing an ontology for Semantic Web Techniques as covered in the course CS6795 on a high level, which will serve for inferential query and as metadata for finding specific course material. The Semantic Web Techniques ontology will be rooted in the class Thing (level 0) and branch into subclasses FormalKnowledge (refined in “Distributed Semantic Web Knowledge Representation and Inferencing”), WebLanguage, Inference, etc. (level 1).

Similar subClassOf branching will continue across several further levels, constituting an RDFS backbone taxonomy in the form of a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Using the course CS 6795 “Mindmap” slide, “Notes and Lecture Schedule 2012” page (plus some of the linked course material) as semi-formal inputs, property-defined classes will be added to build a more heavy-weight OWL 2.0 SemWebTech ontology. This ontology will be populated by sample instances in the form of URLs of actual course material.

We will be generating all of the encodings by Protégé 4.0 from its visual user input. Protégé 4.0 also permits inferencing with these ontologies employing plugged-in reasoners such as Pellet 1.5 (Pellet is an OWL 2.0 reasoner. It provides standard and cutting-edge reasoning services for OWL 2.0 ontologies. Pellet includes support for OWL 2.0 profiles. It incorporates optimizations for nominals, conjunctive query answering, and incremental reasoning.). We will be using OWLViz as well for graphical representation of our ontology .