ONKI SKOS Server for Publishing and Utilizing SKOS Vocabularies and Ontologies as Services

Abstract

Vocabularies are the building blocks of the Semantic Web providing shared terminological resources for content indexing, information retrieval, data exchange, and content integration. Most semantic web applications in practical use are based on lightweight ontologies and, more recently, on the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) data model being standardized by W3C. Easy and cost-efficient publication, integration, and utilization methods of vocabulary services are therefore highly important for the proliferation of the Semantic Web. This paper presents the ONKI SKOS Server for these tasks. Using ONKI SKOS, a SKOS vocabulary or a lightweight ontology can be published on the web as ready-to-use services in a matter of minutes. The services include not only a browser for human usage, but also Web Service and AJAX interfaces for concept finding, selecting and transporting resources from the ONKI SKOS Server to connected systems. Code generation services for AJAX and Web Service APIs are provided automatically, too. ONKI SKOS services are also used for semantic query expansion in information retrieval tasks. The idea of publishing ontologies as services is analogous to Google Maps. In our case, however, vocabulary services are provided and mashed-up in applications. ONKI SKOS was published in the beginning of 2008 and is to our knowledge the first generic SKOS server of its kind. The system has been used to publish and utilize some 60 vocabularies and ontologies in the National Finnish Ontology Service ONKI www.yso.fi.

SISSVoc: A Linked Data API for access to SKOS vocabularies

“…Note that SKOSMOS is the successor project to ONKI SKOS Server [36]. At the time that SISSVoc design was initiated (2009) ONKI was based on SOAP Web Service technologies with AJAX web interfaces.…”

Biological Names and Taxonomies on the Semantic Web – Managing the Change in Scientific Conception

“…Fig. 4 depicts the user interface of the ONKI server [24]. The user is browsing the species lists of cerambycid beetles, and has made a query for taxon names starting with a string "ab".…”

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

“…Figure 2 gives a more detailed overview of the HealthFinland system architecture. Metadata and documents are collected from the content publishers either by harvesting content and metadata from their content management systems or by annotating content manually using the SAHA metadata editor [37] connected to ONKI ontology services [36]. The content is validated and possible problems are reported to the content providers.…”

“…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.…”