M164 Knowledge Technologies

Academic Year 2020-2021

Exercise 1 (DBpedia)
The most central data source in the linked data cloud is DBpedia (http://wiki.dbpedia.org/ ), a big
knowledge base which is essentially a “translation” of parts of Wikipedia into RDF. In this
exercise you will become familiar with DBpedia by examining its contents and posing SPARQL
queries. More specifically, you have to do the following:
 Become familiar with DBpedia by browsing its web site. Pay special attention to the
DBpedia ontology (http://wiki.dbpedia.org/services-resources/ontology ), which you will
use to formulate your queries. Browse the Wikipedia knowledge captured by DBpedia
starting from a resource that you know well e.g., the writer Nikos Kazantzakis
(http://dbpedia.org/page/Nikos_Kazantzakis) and following links to other DBpedia
resources. Do the example queries given in http://wiki.dbpedia.org/OnlineAccess
 Use the public SPARQL endpoint over the DBpedia data set at http://dbpedia.org/sparql
to pose the following queries:
o Find all Greek wines known by DBpedia and the region of Greece where they are
produced.
o Find all the prime ministers of Greece known to DBpedia. Output their name, the
party or parties they have been members of and the University (-ies) that they
have graduated from.
o Find all the Greek universities known to DBpedia. Output their name, the city that
they are located and the number of prime ministers of Greece that have graduated
from them (order answers by this number).
[30 marks]
Exercise 2 (Querying the Greek administrative geography dataset using SPARQL)
Our group has initiated the development of a linked open data portal of interest to Greece (http://
www.linkedopendata.gr/). In the context of this effort, we have developed an ontology and a
corresponding dataset for the new administrative system of Greece known as the Kallikratis plan
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_divisions_of_Greece). This exercise involves
posing SPARQL 1.1 queries against this ontology and dataset.
First, we ask you to understand the Kallikratis ontology gag-ontology.rdf given at the
Web page of the exercises for the course (http://cgi.di.uoa.gr/~pms509/projects.htm). See also
the brief documentation available there.
Then consider the dataset for Kallikratis given at the same Web page. To do this, follow the
instructions of the installation guide of rdf4j (previously called Sesame) RDF store. Load the
dataset and use SPARQL 1.1 to express the following queries:
 Give the official name and population of each municipality (δήμος) of Greece.
 For each region (περιφέρεια) of Greece, give its official name, the official name of each
regional unit (περιφερειακή ενότητα) that belongs to it, and the official name of each
municipality (δήμος) in this regional unit. Organize your answer by region, regional unit
and municipality.
 For each municipality of the region Peloponnese with population more than 5,000 people,
give its official name, its population, and the regional unit it belongs to. Organize your
answer by municipality and regional unit.
 For each municipality of Peloponnese for which we have no seat (έδρα) information in
the dataset, give its official name.
 For each municipality of Peloponnese, give its official name and all the administrative
divisions of Greece that it belongs to according to Kallikratis. Your query should be the
simplest one possible, and it should not use any explicit knowledge of how many levels
of administration are imposed by Kallikratis.
 For each region of Greece, give its official name, how many municipalities belong to it,
the official name of each regional unit (περιφερειακή ενότητα) that belongs to it, and how
many municipalities belong to that regional unit.
 Check the consistency of the dataset regarding stated populations: the sum of the
populations of all administrative units A of level L must be equal to the population of the
administrative unit B of level L+1 to which all administrative units A belong to. (You
have to write one query only.)
 Give the decentralized administrations (αποκεντρωμένες διοικήςεις) of Greece that
consist of more than two regional units. (You cannot use SPARQL 1.1 aggregate
operators to express this query.)
[150 marks]
Exercise 3 (Greek administrative geography and GeoNames)
GeoNames (http://www.geonames.org/) is a gazetteer that collects both geospatial and thematic
information for various placenames around the world. GeoNames data is available through
various Web services but it is also published as linked data (http://www.geonames.org/ontology/
documentation.html).
In order to make accessible to users of the Kallikratis dataset mentioned above, the rich
geographical information held by Geonames, we have interlinked the two datasets by creating
owl:sameAs links for each municipality in the Kallikratis dataset. For example, the assertion
<http://geo.linkedopendata.gr/gag/id/9325> owl:sameAs
<http://sws.geonames.org/8133762/>

links the Kallikratis entity “ΔΗΜΟΣ ΧΑΝΙΩΝ” with the same entity in the Geonames dataset.
Your job in this exercise is to use these links to answer the queries given below. You should use
the SPARQL endpoint for the Kallikratis dataset available at http://geo.linkedopendata.gr/gag-
endpoint/ (instead of your own rdf4j deployment as you did in Exercise 2) and try its various
ways of returning answers to your queries.
 Find all information that Geonames has for “Dimos Chania” (you have to use only
Geonames here, not the Kallikratis dataset).
 Find all information held by Geonames for municipalities in the regional unit of Chania
(περιφερειακή ενότητα Χανίων).
 For every municipality of the region of Crete according to Kallikratis, find its population
and its population given by Geonames. Is the population information in the two datasets
the same? Discuss the quality of the results.
 What kind of hierarchical administrative information for Greece is provided by
Geonames and how does it compare to the Kallikratis dataset? Explain your answer using
appropriate SPARQL queries on the joint datasets and their results.
[40 marks]
Exercise 4 (http://schema.org )
As we have discussed in class, http://schema.org is a major effort from the top search engine
companies (Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex) to help web designers annotate their pages with
structured information which can then be used by search engines for better indexing of these web
pages. You can read about this effort at https://developers.google.com/search/ and
http://schema.org/ .
As you can see http://schema.org/ provides an ontology for annotating Web pages. This exercise
asks you to write queries that navigate this ontology and are evaluated using RDFS reasoning.
First browse the ontology starting from the page https://schema.org/docs/schemas.html. You
should also read about the data model and other information about this ontology at
http://schema.org/docs/documents.html. Then download the latest version of the core ontology
from https://schema.org/version/3.1/, store it in a rdf4j repository that supports inferencing, and
use SPARQL 1.1 to express the following queries:
 Find all subclasses of class CollegeOrUniversity (note that http://schema.org/ prefers to use
the equivalent term “type” for “class”).
 Find all the superclasses of class CollegeOrUniversity.
 Find all properties defined for the class CollegeOrUniversity together with all the properties
inherited by its superclasses.
 Find all classes that are subclasses of class Thing and are found in at most 2 levels of
subclass relationships away from Thing.
 Finally, express the above queries on the ontology and dataset but without the use of
inferencing.
[50 marks]
Exercise 5 (Using http://schema.org to annotate Web pages)
Now that we have understood what http://schema.org/ is, let us use it to annotate the Web page
of the professor giving this class (http://cgi.di.uoa.gr/~koubarak/). First of all read about this task
on http://schema.org/docs/gs.html and familiarize yourself with the relevant technologies of
Microdata, RDFa and JSON-LD. You can also see examples of using http://schema.org/ on the
main web page of each of its elements (e.g., see examples of using the class CollegeOrUniversity
at the bottom of the page https://schema.org/CollegeOrUniversity). Google recommends to use
JSON-LD to annotate Web pages (see https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-
structured-data).
Your job in this exercise is to use the format of JSON-LD to prepare a new version of the Web
page http://cgi.di.uoa.gr/~koubarak/ (but please use a different name!) and the Web pages found
by following the links Teaching and Publications/Publications By Year (for the latter Web page
you only need to encode information about 3 publications, again use different imaginary names
of authors).
You should use the Google tool available at https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-
tool/u/0/ to verify your code. The JSON-LD code should be embedded in your HTML code to
have fully functional Web pages which can be explored using your favorite browser.
[100 marks]