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Engineering LibreTexts

Preface

  • Page ID
    54113
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    The first version of this textbook received encouraging feedback and made it into print with the non-profit publisher College Publications. The print version is still actual and relevant. This version 1.5 does have a few additions and corrections that seemed to deserve more than a 0.1-point notch. The main additions consist of about 10% increased main content, consisting main of 10% more exercises in Chapters 2- 9, a new preliminary Chapter 11 on ontology modularisation, and a new section on challenges for multilingualism (§ 9.1.3). The appendix has increased with two new tutorials—on OntoClean and on OBDA—and more answers to selected exercises. Also, typos and related infelicities that have been found were corrected, and in the grey area of copyright issues, I tweaked a few more figures a bit just to be on the safe side. Altogether, this caused an increase of 36 pages. If the reader wants access to v1 nonetheless: the pdf is still available as OEbookV1.pdf.

    In addition the the book’s content in the pdf file, the website accompanying the textbook now has has more materials, notably the slides (in pdf, LATEX source, and ppt), new ontologies for the tutorials and exercises, and additional software for the exercises. This material can be found at https://people.cs.uct.ac.za/~mkeet/ OEbook/. The website also contains a page with instructions for improved accessibility for the visually impaired, in particular for low-cost screen reader training to handle the Description Logics symbols.

    As with the previous v1, more can indeed be added, but there are certain time constraints. For contributions to the additions, I would like to thank former and current students Zubeida Khan, Zola Mahlaza, Frances Gillis-Webber, Michael Harrison, Toky Raboanary, and Joan Byamugisha, as well as the grant from the “Digital Open textbooks for Development” (DOT4D) Project that made some of the additions possible. Also, I would like to thank the constructive feedback on the ontologies by Ludger Jansen, which has led to improvements of the content.

    C. Maria Keet

    Cape Town, South Africa

    February, 2020

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