SPARQL Tutorial slides

by Bijan Parsia

Next week—next Monday in fact—I shall give the long awaited SPARQL Tutorial.

Woo.

This has taken far too much of my life.

However, I now have slides which are almost, but not entirely, disjoint from the paper which itself is pretty disjoint from my proposed outline.

In this way, my tutorial recaptiulates the spec.

I used S5 for the slides. S5 is pretty slick, but still needs some work (e.g., for printing).

CSS is pretty cool, but somethings are just brutal. Centering arbitrary objects and starting the numbering of a list at an arbitrary point (in order to have a list that spans two slides) come to mind.

Keep fighting for Plan B. The half victory is welcome, but dangerous. The T-shirts are cool.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 at 5:11 am and is filed under SPARQL the QL, Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Kingsley Idehen 08/30/2006 04:17 PM 1 point
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What about using SIOC and FOAF data for your SPARQL Examples? This will make a world of difference to the general comprehension of tutorial subject matter.

http://pingthesemanicweb.com is great place to locate sample data. Ditto: http://esw.w3.org/topic/SIOC/EnabledSites .

The Oedipus example is one of those samples that obscurs the Semantic Web comprehension process for neophytes. Its too much of a quantum leap (IMHO).

BTW - Great Tutorial!

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Bijan Parsia 08/30/2006 09:00 PM 1 point
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Thanks for the feedback and compliments.

Two positioning points: The slides are not meant to be stand alone, and the target audience is an intensive summer school for graduate students working in the area. Now, many may just be starting to work in the area, so I'll find out how well I've aimed this on Monday. (I'm also first on the billing, oy!)

I hope these ameliorate the Oedipus example. I like it because it's a great example of reasoning by cases, and, really, it's not that hard to understand. Plus, it has that nice classical flavor!

As for FOAF and SIOC (what's that?) data, I'm not so sure where you think they would have extra force. Do you mean instead of Oedipus? (But then they wouldn't illustrate the difference between distinguished and non-distinguished variables very nicely.) Or do you mean instead of my :mochi examples (which seem harmless).

It would be nice to have better integration with live demos (in fact, I almost did that with the Pellet web demo), but, in the end, for slides, it seemed a little tricky to get it right (and I was way overdue with the slides!) If I do something like this again, I'll try to play more with that.

Also, in the end, it's not really a tutorial about how to use SPARQL, but more about how to think about (only some of!) the challenges of RDF query langauges. There are loads more than I touched on, alas. The account of the semantics is woeful, indeed, in part because we don't have a good theoretical understanding nicely worked out and settled. Shocking, isn't it!

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