Katri Seppälä

Building a national semantic web ontology and ontology service infrastructure the FinnONTO approach

This paper presents the vision and results of creating a national level cross-domain ontology and ontology service infrastructure in Finland. The novelty of the infrastructure is based on two ideas. First, a system of open source core ontologies is being developed by transforming thesauri into mutually aligned lightweight ontologies, including a large top ontology that is extended by various domain specific ontologies. Second, the ONKI Ontology Server framework for publishing ontologies as ready to use services has been designed and implemented. ONKI provides legacy and other applications with ready to use functionalities for using ontologies on the HTML level by Ajax and semantic widgets. The idea is to use ONKI for creating mash-up applications in a way analogous to using Google or Yahoo Maps, but in our case external applications are mashed-up with ontology support.

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.

Linked Open Ontology Cloud KOKO—Managing a System of Cross-Domain Lightweight Ontologies

The Linked Data movement has focused on building cross-domain interoperability by creating and using (typically) owl:sameAs mappings between the datasets in the Linked Data Cloud (LOD). However, when linking data, ontologies would allow for deeper interoperability. Because different ontologies have been used when annotating different datasets, we argue that the LOD cloud needs to be complemented by developing a lightweight “Linked Open Ontology Cloud” (LOO). Aligning the ontologies requires more refined techniques than mapping data instances for the LOD.