Organized by:
Peter Crocker, Oxford Semantic Technologies
Theme & goals
In this tutorial, attendees will learn what reasoning is, what it can to do transform data, and crucially, how to do that themselves. After a brief theoretical introduction to the subject, attendees will be expected to get hands on with a reasoning engine in order to learn how to setup a reasoning ready datastore, and how to reason over it using Datalog rules. No prior experience is required as we will run through the process step-by-step, start to finish.
Reasoning is one of the most powerful tools available to those utilizing the semantic web but it has been consistently misunderstood and undervalued as a result of a difficult history. For many years it struggled to bear fruit as a slow technology that failed to meet expectations, and understandably garnered an appropriate reputation. Today however, this has all changed. Last year Prof. Ian Horrocks was awarded the Lovelace Medal for his work on reasoning systems, work that propelled reasoning out from being a fanciful daydream and into reality, now capable of delivering on the promises of the past. This is the technology that we bring you. Fast, stable, and with absolute correctness, reasoning is being adopted more and more in industry. The time has come for this tool to be widely understood by the community at large, not just as a shallow awareness, but as a deep technical familiarity.
Audience
Best suited to online participation due to involvement requiring a computer, although an in-person tutorial would also work well. A slide deck, including educational content, exercises, and instructions, all made available in advance. Data—made available on the day of the tutorial. Software and other requirements for attendees:
Delivery methodology
Over the course of the tutorial attendees will learn:
Each topic will first be demonstrated to the students so they can copy an ideal example and see the intended results in an informal teacher-student format. Then they will be given the opportunity to apply their new learned skills without immediate direction, writing rules and queries by themselves. If at any point a participant requires some assistance, the lecturers will be on hand to help, whether that requires a minor hint, a refresh of the material, or gentle guidance. Anyone of any skill level should leave this class knowing what reasoning is and how to implement it, so individual support is flexible depending on the needs of the group.
Tutor
The lecturers for this session are Peter Crocker, CEO at Oxford Semantic Technologies, Valerio Cocchi, Senior Knowledge Engineer at Oxford Semantic Technologies. As CEO at Oxford Semantic Technologies (OST), Peter enjoys working with clients to help find answers to their business questions. Under his management, OST has made great developments as a knowledge graph and reasoning engine, currently used for data integration, in regulatory compliance, and for configuration engines, among many other use cases.
Peter joined in January 2018 after working at IBM where most recently he was the Program Director for IBM Watson IoT Platform Product Management. Peter brings many years’ experience in product development, product architecture, technical sales, and as a worldwide consultant—all predominantly in the enterprise integration and event processing space. Peter has both a Master of Engineering Science, First class, and Master of Computer Science, Distinction, from the University of Oxford.
