This ISWC2014 tutorial introduces into Apache Marmotta, an open and extensible platform for Linked Data, which provides SPARQL 1.1 and LDP 1.0 support, with many modules and extensions, hosted by the Apache Software Foundation. The tutorial will show in a hands-on workshop how to setup Apache Marmotta, how to use it as a Linked Data Platform server for publishing and maintaining datasets, and how to build and extend Linked Data applications based on this platform. A specific focus will be on Apache Marmotta’s semantic media management capabilities with an introduction into the SPARQL-MM multimedia querying extension.
The Linked Data Platform working group at W3C is currently finalising the first version of the Linked Data Platform (LDP) recommendation. The goal of the Linked Data Platform is to provide a specification on how to use HTTP to interact with servers that expose their resources as Linked Data. Beyond the established Linked Data principles, it provides additional functionalities like create, read, update, and delete resources, manage collections of resources in different containers, and combining RDF and non-RDF resources (e.g. media resources). It is expected that many Linked Data servers will in the coming months add support for some of the LDP functionalities. Apache Marmotta, an Open Source implementation of a Linked Data server with many modules and extensions, is one of the first frameworks to offer a feature-complete reference implementation of this recommendation. As Open Source Software hosted by the Apache Software Foundation, it is a framework that can be used and extended freely in both academic and commercial contexts, and is therefore well suited as foundation for the Linked Data Platform. As the Linked Data Platform is an emerging standard, it has – to the best of our knowledge – so far not been presented in similar tutorials.
The audience of the workshop are Semantic Web practitioners/developers interested in the upcoming Linked Data Platform and/or in Semantic Media Management, as well as researchers with a general interest in the topic. Since the topic is of high relevance, we expect around 20-30 participants to the tutorial. More than 30 would be difficult to manage in the proposed tutorial format.
Participants should have prior knowledge on using Linked Data and related technologies, like RDF and SPARQL. They should also have basic programming skills in Java and/or Javascript.
The tutorial is hosted by the 13th International Semantic Web Conference, taking place on morning of Monday October 20th of 2014, at Riva del Garda, Trento (Italy). In case you are interested, check the full conference program. There you can also find some more information about attending to the conference.
There are some technical requirements that would be great people attenting the tutorial would come with them installed:
For testing this requirements, we’ve prepared an example project to use for the tutorial. Please, try to get it running in your laptop before coming to the tutorial:
git clone git@github.com:wikier/apache-marmotta-tutorial-iswc2014.git cd apache-marmotta-tutorial-iswc2014 mvn clean tomcat7:run
And of course, it is expected you have basic knowledge about RDF 1.1, SPARQL 1.1, LDP 1.0, LDPath, and Linked Data technologies in general.
Since the tutorial is introducing into a software framework, it will be presented using short introductory presentations (15 minutes each) and hands-on workshop (45 minutes each) where all participants are expected to work with the technology under the guidance of the presenters.
Then the (half-day) tutorial will introduce into Apache Marmotta in three parts:
We will start with a general introduction into Apache Marmotta, describing its architecture, its many functionalities and typical use cases. Specific focus will be on how to install and configure it for different kinds of use cases (demo server, production server, reasoning, versioning) and how to publish custom datasets and interact with them using standard Linked Data approaches. Participants will install Apache Marmotta on their own Laptops and use their own datasets for working with it.
Presenter: Sebastian Schaffert (slides)
The second part will be an in-depth workshop on how to use the Linked Data Platform based on Apache Marmotta. We will first give an introduction into the main features of the Linked Data Platform recommendation. Participants will then learn how to use these features in a hands-on session with Apache Marmotta using the installation and datasets they created in the first part.
Presenters: Sergio Fernández (slides) and Jakob Frank (hands-on)
The third part is concerned with a specific use case of the Linked Data Platform, Semantic Media Management. We will demonstrate how to use the Linked Data Platform to integrate multimedia content and metadata in a single framework and build simple applications on top of this data. We will also show Marmotta’s SPARQL-MM implementation, an extension of SPARQL adding specific multimedia querying functionality to SPARQL based on the Media Fragments URI recommendation.
Presenter: Thomas Kurz (slides)
Dr. Sebastian Schaffert is CTO and co-founder of RedLink GmbH. He is also currently working as head of the Knowledge and Media Technologies department at Salzburg Research and occassionally as a lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences (FH) Salzburg. He received his diploma in Computer Science in 2001 and his PhD in 2004, both at the University of Munich, Germany. His current research focus is Semantic Web technologies, especially Linked Data, Semantic Search, Information Extraction, and Multimedia Information Systems.
Sebastian Schaffert has considerable experience in project management, software engineering as well as system administration. He has worked in important Open Source projects since 1998 and is an active contributor to the two projects Apache Marmotta and Apache Stanbol. He is also regularly publishing articles in scientific journals and conferences.
Teaching Experience: more than 10 years at University of Munich and Fachhochschule Salzburg, numerous presentations at conferences and workshops, organizer of Semantic Wiki workshop series between 2006 and 2009.
Sergio Fernández is co-founder of Redlink GmbH, Senior Researcher at Salzburg Research, and contributor to Apache Marmotta. Sergio is a Software Engineer specialized on applied research. His research is focused on different aspects of Web Science, where he’s mainly interested about Web Architectures, Data Integration, Social Semantic Web and Linked Data. Sergio has worked in some applied research institutes around Europe: more than six years at CTIC (Spain), for a few months in 2008 visiting DERI (Ireland), and in 2012 he joined the KMT team at Salzburg Research. In these years he has participated in large-scale European research projects as well as in W3C standardization groups. Sergio has large experience on collaborative open source development, and he actively cooperates with organizations such as the Apache Software Foundation.
Teaching Experience: several lectures at universities and private centres, lead of requirements and software engineering workshops.
Thomas Kurz is Researcher at the Knowledge and Media Technologies group of Salzburg Research. His research interests are Semantic Web technologies in combination with multimedia, human-computer interaction regarding to RDF metadata, and Semantic Search. He is doing his PhD at the University of Passau under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Kosch (Department of Distributed Information Systems). The topic of Thomas’ PhD is the development of a Linked Media query language that unifies classical information retrieval techniques and structured query approaches. Thomas was involved in the European project KIWI (EU FP7 STREP). He was use case manager in the Austrian Competence Centre for New Media (Salzburg NewMediaLab TNG) and is one of the main contributors of the Open Source projects Linked Media Framework and Apache Marmotta. In addition he is leading several UI application projects in the field of Semantic Web and multimedia like the thesaurus editor skosjs, the SPARQL UI Squebi, and an html5 player for rich annotated videos named lime.
Teaching Experience: lecturer at Fachhochschule Salzburg, several conference and workshop presentations.
Jakob Frank is co-founder of Redlink GmbH, Committer and PMC Chair in Apache Marmotta and researcher at Salzburg Research. His main focus is on Linked Data, Semantic Search and Multimedia Analysis.
Jakob Frank received his Master’s degree (MSc) at the Vienna University of Technology in 2010. Jakob is researcher at the Knowledge and Media Technologies group at Salzburg Research. His main focus is on Linked Data, Linked Media and Semantic Search. Jakob is also Committer and PMC Chair in the Apache Marmotta project. Before that, he was working as Research Assistant at the Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems at the Vienna University of Technology. His main focus was on Music Information Retrieval and the Organization of and Access to Large Media Databases, especially on mobile devices. Jakob Frank also was also involved in the European projects MUSCLE NoE and CHORUS+, in the local organizing committees of ECDL 2005, ISMIR 2007 and iPres 2010, and as a co-reviewer for a number of top- level conferences in computer science (ECDL, ICADL, JCDL and SIGIR).
Teaching Experience: several years as research and teaching assistant at Vienna University of Technology.
This tutorial is partially supported by MICO (grant no. 610480) and Fusepool P3 (grant no. 609696) FP7 projects, as well as the Apache Software Foundation.
