From IKS Project

Welcome to the Industrial Training Section of IKS. We have organised the learning material as follows:

Initial Concepts first explains three notions of the term "semantics", then introduces you to the ideas of the semantic web, and finally points you to important market developments around the concepts of Linked Data and Future Internet.

Resource Description Framework RDF introduces the technology on which most of the semantic web is based. It also introduces the notation for Microdata which is increasingly being used in the major search engines.

Methodology for building semantic components gets you acquainted with the major ingredients of semantic CMS: terminology management, web data schemas, advanced search facilities, enabling rich user interaction, and dealing with business rules.

Methodology for using IKS components presents the open source software we have already developed in IKS and which you can integrate in your own CMS, under a permissive (Apache/BSD) license.

Assessing semantic technologies gives you some guidelines and recommendations that should help you in choosing what you really need, once somebody has come up to you and said: "you need semantic this or semantic that ..." We provide assistance for the role of a CMS buyer, for the end user, and for the CMS technologist who wants to invest in technical capabilities around semantic technologies.

Beyond CMS with semantic extensions is for those who are ready for the "deep end" of semantic technologies: you have thrown away your previous CMS (or never had one) and you are looking at content management as an appendix to semantic management of knowledge! Beware - here you may get attacked by academic ideas, blue sky research visions and by incomplete research prototypes. It is up to you to assess whether this the right thing for your business. But hey - this is where IKS started, when it was proposed to the European Commission in 2008 ... :-)

Table of Content

NOTE: this learning material is under construction. Work started in May 2011, a first version should be usable in Q1 2012, and interested parties (notably CMS technology providers and people offering semantic web courses) are welcome now or at any time, to comment and also to contribute (preferably by offering links to other relevant learning material). The official delivery date for the material is 31 Dec 2012, the end of the IKS project.

Editor's notes for contributors, on the approach taken to develop the material for IKS Industrial training.

Initial Concepts

Resource Description Framework RDF and Microdata

Methodology for Building "Semantic" Components into CMS

IKS Reference Architecture (comparing your Stack with IKS)
Managing Terminologies (aka using Ontologies)
Web Data Schemas (the data schemas promoted and used by the large search engines)
Semantic Search (aka querying content repositories that have various forms of meta data)
Semantic Interaction (aka interacting with content at the knowledge level)
Business Rules (aka programming content repositories that have knowledge bases)

Methodology for using IKS components in your own CMS

Semantic enhancers - making your content semantically rich in order to support semantic search
Entity and content hub - making your CMS flexible enough to merge external and internal resources as needed
Semantic Lifting - programming knowledge-level interfaces to content repositories
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning - associating structure knowledge with content and reasoning on it)
Semantically aware user interfaces - Programming semantic CMS for user interaction

Assessing semantic technologies and choosing what you really need