The program includes invited talks and tutorials by leading experts in the field, which are complemented by hands-on sessions, exercises and student projects. The main themes are “Formal Semantics”, “Ontology Engineering and Metadata” and “Semantic Web and Services”, “Multimedia” and “Natural Language Processing” all of which are presented both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view.
Throughout the school, emphasis is also given to real world applications.
Module “Formal Semantics”:
The goal of this module is to teach students the mathematical foundations of logic and formal semantics. In this first module of the school the students will learn to understand the mathematically profound basics and terminology developed to grasp the ideas for the rest of the school. Syntax, semantics and other terms of formal logic are fundamentally defined and distinguished.
Module “Ontology Engineering and Metadata”:
The goal of this module is to teach students to build and manage ontologies and to formalize conceptual models using Semantic Web standard languages such as OWL. The module is divided into a lecture unit introducing ontology engineering as a discipline describing methodologies and methods supporting particular phases in an ontology life cycle (particularly ontology matching), followed by tutorials, hands-on sessions and exercises on ontology modeling, and languages and reasoning, respectively.
Module “Semantic Web and Services”:
This module gives an overview of the core concepts underlying the Semantic Web, of the state of the art in the field and the current directions of research and development. It covers also an overview of tools and languages used to develop semantic systems. The module includes a lecture unit followed by a tutorial, a hands-on session and exercises in which the students get familiar with common methods and tools used on the Semantic Web.
Module “Multimedia”:
In the multimedia module the students will learn about the newest trends in multimedia content analysis and how the techniques can be applied to images, videos, and acoustic data. The module approaches content analysis in an integrated
manner, focusing on the overlap of computer vision, acoustic signal processing, and human computer interaction. Current scientific state-of-the art will be presented with a focus on applicability. The adoption of current semantic technoliogies to multimedia will be discussed and new potential research areas will be presented.
Module “Natural Language Processing”:
Linguists have worked on semantic for centuries. This module will introduce the linguistic definition of semantics and will present problems and research work performed on it from a linguistics perspective. In a second part of the module, the more modern field of natural language processing will be introduced and an overview of the current state-of-the-art will be given. The module will close outlining and summarizing the connections between natural language processing and semantic technologies as well as new research topics that are currently evolving.
The technical program of the school will be complemented by a suite of social activities.
