Building a National Semantic Web Ontology and Ontology Service Infrastructure –The FinnONTO Approach

Abstract

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 2 is an operational online demonstration on a national Finnish level of implementing of such a semantic portal. The system consists of a national ontology infrastructure [2], content creation process, and an online portal [3]. In this paper, the main parts of CULTURESAMPO are first shortly overviewed.…”

HealthFinland—A national semantic publishing network and portal for health information

“…Figure 1): 1) The Domain Vocabularies describe the different aspects of health information such as topics, genres and audiences, and they are published in an ontology repository as part of the FinnONTO system of mutually interlinked vocabularies/ontologies [19]. 2) The Content Production System contains specifications and tools for annotating, harvesting, and verifying content.…”

“…An early approach of creating and using an ontology infrastructure is presented in [22]. The infrastructure underlying HealthFinland was developed within the FinnONTO project [19] where HealthFinland has been a major application case, in addition to the analogous CultureSampo system [14] for cultural heritage content. Both systems are based on distributed semantic content creation, centralized ontology library services, and a portal supporting semantic search and recommendation [11].…”

“…All the tools and services discussed above have been implemented and tested in a real world setting, and the prototype portal has been published on the Web 18 . The HealthFinland system was awarded the third prize at the Open Track of the Semantic Web Challenge 2008 competition 19 . The National Institute for Health and Welfare is building a production version of the HealthFinland portal.…”

“…The design and implementation of the portal information architecture and user interface was presented [33], and the design and implementation of the portal in more detail in [32]. The FinnONTO ontology service infrastructure and services used in the system are presented in [42,19,36]. This article complements our earlier work and publications by providing a more detailed description of the HealthFinland portal components, the content creation infrastructure, the user interface, and the evaluations performed.…”