Have you purchased yours? Buy Your All-Access Pass now & get lifetime access!

Tara Raafat Davide D'Amico

OWL or SHACL – A Beginner’s Guide to Making the Right Choice

A Talk by Tara Raafat and Davide D'Amico

Proudly supported by

About this Talk

As organizations increasingly adopt knowledge graphs (KGs) to enhance their strategic objectives, one of the most pressing questions that arises is: should one utilize OWL or SHACL? Are both necessary, or can one substitute the other?

Understanding the differences, overlaps, and appropriate contexts for these technologies is crucial for the effective development of KGs. Whether KGs are intended for knowledge organization, search optimization, data interoperability, or serving as a foundation for large language models (LLMs), the choice between OWL and SHACL can influence the impact and scalability of the project, regardless of its size.

Making the right decision between OWL and SHACL is critical in ensuring that the ontology is not only functional but also maximally effective in addressing the problem at hand. However, these technologies are sometimes underutilized or not fully leveraged to their potential.

The aim of this masterclass is to introduce participants to the fundamentals of OWL and SHACL, their purposes, their strengths and their true usages through a hands-on exploration of a real-world domain example. Participants will engage with multiple problem statements and will be tasked with determining whether OWL, SHACL, or both should be applied to solve each issue, critically evaluating the implications of their decisions.

This masterclass is designed for individuals new to these technologies or those in the early stages of developing KGs within their organizations or projects. Attendees will gain a foundational understanding of OWL and SHACL, exploring their respective purposes, similarities, and distinctions.

A brief introduction to SPARQL will also be provided, enabling participants to test and validate their implementations. Through practical, hands-on exercises, participants will model ontologies and SHACL shapes using open-source tools, and apply queries to test their solutions.

By the end of the masterclass, participants will have a strong understanding of both technologies, and the ability to decide when and how to apply each effectively.

Key Topics

  • OWL: Constructing ontologies using OWL
  • SHACL: Creating SHACL shapes
  • Decision-making: When to choose OWL or SHACL for solving specific problems
  • SPARQL: Querying and validating implementations

Target Audience:

  • Knowledge Engineers
  • Data Engineers
  • Data Analysts
  • Managers overseeing the above roles

Workshop Goals

Participants will gain hands-on experience in creating KGs using OWL and SHACL, while developing an understanding of the purpose of each technology and the practical implications of selecting either for solving domain-specific problems.

Session Outline:

  • Introduction to RDF, OWL, and open-source tools for implementation of ontologies
  • Introduction to SHACL
  • Quick Overview of SPARQL
  • Practical problem statements to be solve by either constructing ontologies and/or SHACL shapes
  • Running reasoners to validate ontology models
  • Executing SPARQL queries to test against problem statements

Format:

This workshop will be highly interactive, emphasizing practical, hands-on learning. Participants will first be introduced to the foundational concepts of OWL and SHACL through introductory lectures.

These sessions will be followed by applied activities, where participants will address domain-specific problem statements utilizing these technologies.

Using Protégé, participants will develop ontologies and execute reasoning tasks.

Concurrently, they will employ Jupyter notebooks, leveraging standard Python libraries, to design and implement SHACL shapes.

Finally, participants will execute SPARQL queries within the Jupyter environment to assess the efficacy of their solutions.

Level:

Beginner

Prerequisite Knowledge:

Familiarity with RDF and Python is advantageous but not required.

11 December 2024, 04:15 PM

Data Modeling Stage

04:15 PM - 06:15 PM

Add to Calendar

About The Speakers

Tara Raafat

Tara Raafat

Head of Metadata Strategy, Bloomberg

Featured

Dr. Tara Raafat is the head of Bloomberg's metadata strategy at the CTO office. Tara is a semantic technologies specialist with 15+ years of experience in semantic knowledge modeling and knowledge driven applications in domains including but not limited to finance, healthcare, and insurance.

Tara Raafat

Davide D'Amico

Davide D'Amico

Semantic Educator, Bloomberg

Davide at Bloomberg leads initiatives in semantic modeling and data standardization, developing training programs that have upskilled over 700 employees and advanced the adoption of ontology-driven methodologies.

Location

Convene 133 Houndsditch

133 Houndsditch, London

Neo4j

Neo4j, the Graph Database & Analytics leader, helps organizations find hidden relationships and patterns across billions of data connections deeply, easily, and quickly.

Platinum Sponsor

Ontotext

Connect the dots of your data! Ontotext helps enterprises to lower data management costs by up to 30%, enable data fabric architectures, create digital twins, utilize Graph RAG benefits, and take information delivery from days to minutes!

Gold Sponsor

Semantic Web Company / PoolParty

The vendor of PoolParty Semantic Suite. Graph-based text mining, recommender systems, and data fabric solutions.

Gold Sponsor

yWorks

yWorks specializes in the development of professional software solutions that enable the clear visualization of diagrams and networks.

Gold Sponsor

Oracle

This global cloud tech company offers infrastructure and software to enhance organizational innovation and efficiency. Its autonomous database delivers top performance, security, and cost savings. Supporting businesses, governments, and research, the company embraces diversity and fosters growth.

Gold Sponsor

Ultipa

Ultipa builds next-gen graph XAI & real-time database empowering smart enterprises w/ smooth digital transformations.

Sliver Sponsor

Oxford Semantic Technologies

Oxford Semantic Technologies (OST) spun out from the University of Oxford and was acquired by Samsung in 2024. OST provides AI software to extract insights from big data, solving issues like medical diagnostics and financial crime. One founder is a BCS Lovelace Medal winner.

Sliver Sponsor

FlureeDB

Web3 data platform built on standards. Fluree powers connected, secure, and agile data ecosystems.

Bronze Sponsor

Senzing

Senzing is the first to deliver real-time, artificial intelligence for entity resolution. Senzing software enables organizations of all sizes to gain highly accurate and valuable insights about who is who and who is related to whom in data.

Bronze Sponsor

Semantic Partners

We partner with you, and your chosen semantic stack, to liberate your data's meaning from isolated silos.

Bronze Sponsor

Epsilla

All-in-one platform to create AI agents powered by your private data and knowledge. Make GenAI prototype to production 10 times faster. We are backed by Y Combinator. Start free today: https://epsilla.com

Bronze Sponsor

Neural Alpha

Since 2016 Neural Alpha have delivered cutting edge, sustainability centric Connected Data solutions for blue-chip corporates, financial institutions, Governments and NGOs. Our bespoke software & data solutions fuse AI, Knowledge Graphs, Taxonomies & other technologies for unprecedented insights.

Sliver Sponsor

Want to sponsor this event? Contact Us