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School of Computer Science

The Family History Knowledge Base Tutorial

Supplementary Material

we have been developing a family history knowledge base as material for an advanced language concepts tutorial for OWL. It also introduces many of the new features from OWL2. The Manchester Pizza Tutorial introduces users to the basics of OWL. this new tutorial takes them further, concentrating on properties, property hierarchies, property features and individuals. The aim is to give tutees an understanding of how to use OWL individuals and the inferences that can be made with automated reasoning. In particular we concentrate on the entailments on individuals as a result of careful construction of property hierarchies and domain/range constraints.

the topic for this tutorial is Family History. an early version of the Family History Knowledge Base (FHKB) was presented at OWLEd in 2008. the FHKB has some 450 crudely anonymised individuals representing the Stevens family history. the FHKB uses a rich property hierarchy to make a large number of inferences about individuals from very few assertions. As an example, it shows both the power and limitations of OWL2.

The learning objectives for the tutorial are:

  1. The separation into Tbox and Abox.
  2. Understand classes and individuals; when should individuals be used?
  3. Asserting facts about individuals (property assertions and class assertions).
  4. Understanding inferences: The effects of property hierarchies, property characteristics, property chains and domain/range constraints.
  5. the ramifications of the open world assumption.
  6. Anonymous individuals.
  7. The use of nominals (blurring the Tbox ABox distinction).
  8. Understanding the limits of OWL2 when reasoning about instances.

Simon Jupp and I gave a three hour version of this tutorial as an illustrated guided tour at the Protege conference in amsterdam June 2009. The slides are available for this tutorial. We also used a script; it is a bit rough and ready, but it is here to use. We also had a series of intermediate ontologies used during the tutorial:. this zip file also contains a version of the full ontology.

The FHKB will be worked up in to a two day, face to face, hands on tutorial. this will be announced through the usual routes.

you are welcome to use this material. I would welcome credit being given for any material that you use or re-purpose.