Syllabus

Course Title:               Geoinformatics (Geol 4123/6123)
Year/Semester:           Fall 2010
Department:               Geosciences
Prerequisite: None.
The course syllabus provides a general plan for the course; deviations may be necessary!

Instructor: Dr. H. A. Babaie

Textbook and other required course materials:
Textbook: Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL by Dean Allemang and James Hendler. 2nd Edition.

Login to course’s website: Click on ‘Geoinforamtics’ under "Courses Taught" on my website at: www.gsu.edu/~geohab

Course assignments:  See the ‘Schedule of lectures and assignments’ below!

NOTE:

• Please advise the instructor if you have a documented disability that needs to be accommodated!
• Be advised that the last day to withdraw from a course with the possibility of receiving a ‘W’ is Friday Oct. 8.  If a student withdraws by this date but is failing the course, he/she will receive a ‘WF”. All students who withdraw after this date will receive a ‘WF’.

Course’s description: Fundamentals of geoscience knowledge representation applying Semantic Web technologies of OWL, RDF, and RDFS.  Design and development of spatial and process ontologies, design of markup languages.   

Learning outcome: Having taken this course, the students should be able to design and develop efficient Semantic Web applications based on OWL for different fields of geosciences.

Objectives of the course: Upon successfully completing the course, students of this course should be able to do or explain the following:

• Applying description logic in knowledge representation
• Partitioning of the reality – classifying the real objects in a geological field of interest
• Mereotopology
• Knowledge representation, semantics, and pragmatics
• Building domain and top-level ontologies
• Design and development of databases
• The concepts of goundational ontological relations, object, property, state, space, and time
• Building domain markup languages with XML
• Semantic Web languages of RDF, RDFS, and OWL
• Implementing ontologies with the Protégé IDE
• Constructing process and time ontologies
• Inferencing and reasoning with description logic
  

Topics to be covered:

• Data, information, knowledge
• Mereology, topology, description logic
• Spatial ontology: endurant objects, state space, property
• Database design and development
• Process ontology: perdurant objects, state change, event, process, time
• Semantics and pragmatics
• Extensible Markup Language (XML)
• Modeling ontologies with Protégé
• Syntax and inference rules of the Semantic web languages (OWL, RDF, RDFS)
• Design and implementation of ontologies and knowledge base

Schedule of lectures and assignments:

Wk		DATE	TOPIC	EXERCISES & EXAMS
1	T	Aug 24	Introduction to the course
	R		Data, information, knowledge	Rationl Rose IDE
2	T	31	Metadata, Semantic Web technologies	Projects' Web Page
	R	Sep 2	First-order logic Part I	E1- Knowledge capture
3	T	7	Part II	ArgoUMLOpen source UML App.
	R		Mereotopology	E2- Logic Exercise
4	T	14	"	Scenario for class discussion
	R		Database design	E3 -Mereotopology
5	T	21	"	NLP of text to find entities!
	R	23	Ist Exam	Logic, mereotopology
6	T	28	XML Programming - Syntax	Oxygen or XMLSpy Editor
	R		Building XML Schema	E4 - Build domain markup languages
7	T	Oct 5	Resource Desc. Framework (RDF)	Article 1, Article 2
	R		"	E5 - RDF
8	T	12	Serialization formats	Protégé Tutorial: Part I, Part II
	R		RDF Schema (RDFS)	-
9	T	19	"
	R		"	E6 - RDFS
10	T	26	Web Ontology Language (OWL)
	R		"	E7 - OWL
11	T	Nov 2	GSA Meeting (Denver, CO)	Work on E7
	R		OWL ...	-
12	T	9
	R		2nd Exam	XML, RDF, RDFS, OWL
13	T	16	Inference Rules and Reasoning
	R		Graduate student presentations
14	T	23	Thanksgiving Break
	R		Thanksgiving Break
15	T	30	Process ontologies
	R	Dec 2	Final Exam	Comprehensive!
			Final grades will only be posted on GoSolar!

Grading policy:
The final grade will be determined with respect to the weights assigned to various exams and other assignments which are listed below.

Grading scheme:

Final grades will not be posted or given out over the phone or via email.
NOTE: You will see the final grades after you have completed the course evaluations on GoSolar.

Method of Teaching:  The course focuses on knowledge representation and the methods of modeling, ontologies and related knowledge bases in geoscience.  To more effectively expose the students to these important components of geoscience knowledge representation, the course is taught through class lectures, 3 exams, and 8 modeling and programming (logic, XML, RDF, RDFS, OWL) exercises.

Lectures - Students are responsible for learning my lecture notes (handed out in the class) and material from the assigned textbook. Students also need to have the Protégé ontology editor (available at: http://protege.stanford.edu/download/download.html).  To complete the exercises and use the course content, the students also need an XML IDE and a UML modeling application (e.g., IBM’s Rational Rose).

Policies
1. According to the Georgia State University undergraduate catalog, class attendance is expected; failure to attend classes regularly may result in poor course performance. The university requires instructors to verify attendance early in the term. Failure to attend classes may result in you not appearing on the Verification Roll and being dropped from the class. Please see section 1334 of the catalog at http://www.gsu.edu/es/catalogs_courses.html, and click on the appropriate catalog link to read about attendance policy (posted as a .pdf file).

2. All students should be familiar with the University’s course withdrawal procedures. These can be found in section 1332 of the undergraduate catalog.

3. All students are required to be familiar with the Academic Honesty policy of the university (Section 409) and to comply with the policy. This can be found in section 1380 of the undergraduate catalog.

4. Each student must have access to a computer to read all the messages sent to his/her university email address, and complete all assignments that require the use of a computer.  Class changes and/or updates may be conveyed via email, in which case the student is considered to have been informed. The student is required to check this university email box regularly.

5. Accommodations for students with disabilities: Georgia State University complies with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Students with disabilities who seek academic accommodations must first take appropriate documentation to the Office of Disability Services located in Suite 230 of the New Student Center.

Course Policy

Turn off cell phones and keep them off the desk during lectures.  Text messaging or Web browsing during class is strictly prohibited and grounds for dismissal.

Food and drinks are prohibited in class. 

Exams: Include the assigned reading material from class lectures, textbook, and exercises.

Missing Exams: DO NOT miss the scheduled exams unless you have a doctor's or official university excuse which proves an emergency case. It is the student's responsibility to contact me within two days after missing the exam for setting a date for a make-up exam. If acceptable, a make-up exam will be given within 4 days after the date of the missed exam. If the scheduled make-up exam is missed, there will be no second opportunity (for any possible reason) and a zero will be assigned for that exam.

Course Evaluations: Student Course Evaluations will be filled out online at GoSolar (https://www.gosolar.gsu.edu/bprod/twbkwbis.P_WWWLogin).
When you go to the student GoSOLAR screen, one of your link choices will be the evaluations.

E-mail Contact - All students have a GSU e-mail address that looks like: userid@student.gsu.edu
This is the address I will use when I need to contact you, either individually or as a class. You are responsible for reading any requirements, changes, announcements, etc. that are sent to you via this e-mail address. Hence, you should check it at least once daily. If you prefer to use other e-mail account(s), you must activate the mail forwarding feature under Options>Mailbox Management while in your GSU e-mail, so that e-mail from me will reach whatever other e-mail account(s) you have specified. I emphasize that you are responsible for this. To read about your GSU e-mail account, go to: http://help.student.gsu.edu