Jussi Kurki

CultureSampo: A National Publication System of Cultural Heritage on the Semantic Web 2.0

CultureSampo is an application demonstration of a national level publication system of cultural heritage contents on the Web, based on ideas and technologies of the Semantic (Web and) Web 2.0. On the semantic side, the system presents new solutions to interoperability problems of dealing with multiple ontologies of different domains, and to problems of integrating multiple metadata schemas and cross-domain content into a homogeneous semantic portal. A novelty of the system is to use semantic models based on events and narrative process descriptions for modeling and visualizing cultural phenomena, and for semantic recommendations. On the Web 2.0 side, CultureSampo proposes and demonstrates a content creation process for collaborative, distributed ontology and content development including different memory organizations and citizens. The system provides the cultural heritage contents to end-users in a new way through multiple (nine) thematic perspectives, based on semantic visualizations. Furthermore, CultureSampo services are available for external web-applications to use through semantic AJAX widgets.

Elements of a National SemanticWeb Infrastructure--Case Study Finland on the Semantic Web

This article presents the vision and results of creating the basis for a national semantic Web content infrastructure in Finland in 2003-2007. The main elements of the infrastructure are shared and open metadata schemas, core ontologies, and public ontology services. Several practical applications testing and demonstrating the usefulness of the infrastructure are overviewed in the fields of eculture, ehealth, egovernment, elearning, and ecommerce.