The web has become an object of our daily life and the amount of information in the web is ever growing. Besides plain texts, especially multimedia information such as graphics, audio or video have become a predominant part of the web's information traffic. But, how can we find useful information within this huge information space? How can we make use of the knowledge contained in those web documents? Traditional search engines for example will reach the limits of their power, when it comes to understanding information content. The Semantic Web is an extension of the traditional web in the sense that information in the form of natural language text in the web will be complemented by its explicit semantics based on a formal knowledge representation. Thus, the meaning of information expressed in natural language can be accessed in an automated way and interpreted correctly, i.e. it can be ‘understood’ by machines.

Semantic Web technologies enable the explicit representation of knowledge and its further processing to deduce new knowledge from implicitly hidden knowledge. Thus, information access and information search will be more precise and more complete compared to today's traditional information retrieval technology. Previously heterogeneous data can be mapped and combined based on common knowledge representation and schemata easily extended in a dynamic way.

In this MOOC, you will learn the fundamentals of Semantic Web technologies and how they are applied for knowledge representation in the World Wide Web. You will learn how to represent knowledge with ontologies and how to access and benefit from semantic data on the Web. Furthermore, you will also learn how to make use of Linked Data and the Web of Data, currently the most popular applications based on Semantic Web technologies.

Join openHPI's official Twitter Feed: @openHPI

This year's course differs from the 2014 edition in the following way:

• more emphasis on knowledge engineering with practical examples

• there are many EXTRA parts at the end of each lecture week covering additional and in depth topics. These parts marked with EXTRA are NOT GRADED and also not subject of the exams. They are not an 'official' part of the course, but only a voluntary addendum to deepen your knowledge.

Requirements for this course:

• a basic knowledge of the foundations of mathematical logics, i.e. propositional logics and first order logics

• a basic understanding of web technologies, such as URL, http, HTML, and XML-based technologies

• a basic knowledge of database technology such as, e.g. relational databases and SQL query language