ISWC Tutorial: OWL Distilled

Announcing a tutorial for anyone interested in a gentle introduction to OWL from a practical perspective.
Tutorial: OWL Distilled<http://semanticarts.com/owl-distilled>
When: October 11th/12th, 2015
Where: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, US
             Co-located with the 14th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2015<http://iswc2015.semanticweb.org/>)
Objectives:
After this tutorial, students will be familiar with the 30% of OWL that gets used 90% of the time. More specifically, they will:

*        know what an ontology is, in simple terms

*        know what kinds of things you need to say to model subject matter as an ontology

*        know how to say those things in OWL, i.e. formally defining meaning for classes and properties

*        be aware of some common patterns for building ontologies

*        be aware of some common pitfalls to avoid when learning OWL

*        be able to continue learning OWL on their own
Overview:
If you think that getting your (or someone else's) head around OWL is challenging, you have found the right tutorial. There are just a few foundational elements that everything else is built from:

*        Individual things -- e.g. JaneDoe,

*        Kinds of things -- e.g. Organization

*        Kinds of relationships -- e.g. worksFor, dateOfBirth
That's pretty much it.  In this tutorial we will describe the many ways that these things can be combined and used. Most importantly, there are triples that assert relationships between things -- e.g. JaneDoe worksFor Microsoft. There is inference to generate new triples and a few more key things, but not as much as you think.  The topics we will cover include:

*        OWL building blocks: Individuals, Classes and Properties;

*        Triples, Inference, Data & Metadata;

*        Restrictions made intelligible;

*        Boolean constructs: Union, Intersection

*        Common patterns & pitfalls
If you are getting started in OWL, this tutorial has everything you need and nothing you don't.

More details<http://semanticarts.com/owl-distilled>