Getting started

The following list is intended as a guideline how to get started using KnowRob. The first steps aim at getting an overview of what is available and how to use the existing modules. At some point, you will likely want to implement your own components. We try to give some hints on how to go beyond the basic tutorials below.

For effectively using the KnowRob system, some basic knowledge about the main languages, OWL and Prolog, is helpful. It becomes a definite MUST when you would like to do some advanced stuff and start to implement your own modules. Below are links to good tutorials that will get you started.

Download the Protege OWL editor (version 4.1) which makes exploring and editing OWL files much easier: http://protege.stanford.edu/download/protege/4.1/installanywhere/ and have a look at the documentation (http://protegewiki.stanford.edu/index.php/Protege4GettingStarted). The tutorial (http://owl.cs.manchester.ac.uk/tutorials/protegeowltutorial/resources/ProtegeOWLTutorialP4_v1_2.pdf) is not only a good introduction to the Protege program, but to modeling with OWL in general. It will take you a day or two, but is worth the time. Also look at the XML/OWL code you just created in Protege with a text editor to see how the relations you created using the GUI are represented in OWL. It is important now only to understand how things look in the editor, but also how they are encoded in the lower-level data structures.

Though you probably won't need very sophisticated Prolog skills in the beginning, you should have a rough understanding of how a Prolog program looks like and what the basic concepts are to implement your own queries and (later) modules. The tutorials at http://www.learnprolognow.org/ are a very good introduction – try to follow them at least until Lesson 6.