Semantic Web Applications in the Public Sector in Finland – Building the Basis for a National Semantic Web Infrastructure

1. Towards a National Semantic Web Infrastructure This article gives an overview of the Finnish National Semantic Web Ontology project (FinnONTO), 2003-2007 (http://www.seco.tkk.fi/projects/finnonto/). Its ambitious goal is to lay a foundation for a national metadata, ontology, and ontology service framework in Finland, and demonstrate its usefulness in practical applications (Hyvönen et al., 2005b). In our vision, a conceptual semantic infrastructure is needed for semantic web services in the same way as roads are needed for traffic and transportation, power plants and electrical networks are needed for energy supply, or GSM standards and networks are needed for mobile phones and wireless communication. A solid, commonly agreed open infrastructure would make it much easier and cheaper for public organizations and companies to create interoperable, intelligent services on the coming semantic web (http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/). The infrastructure should be open source and its central components be maintained by the public sector order to guarantee wide usage and interoperability across different application domains and users. The consortium behind the project now includes 30 public organizations and companies funding the research, and 8 new members plan to join the team in autumn 2006. This consortium represents a wide area of functions of the society including museums, libraries, health organizations, government, media, and education. Public organizations, companies, and universities are participating in the project. The research is directed and is mostly carried our by the Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo) (http://www.seco.tkk.fi/) at the Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) and the University of Helsinki. Also the University of Tampere is contributing to the work. The goals of the project are the following: 1. Metadata standards. Nationally adapted standards for representing metadata in various applications fields are needed and are being created. 2. Core ontology library. We develop initial versions of a set of central national core ontologies in order to initiate ontology development processes in Finland. The idea is that after the research period, the participating organizations could continue developing the ontologies for machine and human usage instead of traditional thesauri. The most central ontology is the top ontology YSO based on the general Finnish keyword thesaurus YSA (some 23,000 terms) (http://vesa.lib.helsinki.fi), maintained by the National Library of Finland. Resources in YSO will be used and shared by a set of other, mutually interdependent vertical domain ontologies. 3. Public ontology services. An ontology library and web service framework ONKI is being developed (Komulainen et al., 2005) to enable ontology usage in ontology development, indexing, and information retrieval, through public web services. 4. Open source tools. An tool developed within project is OntoViews (Mäkelä et al., 2004), a framework for creating semantic search and browsing services based on the multi-facet search paradigm. A key bottleneck of the proliferation of the semantic web is production of metadata. For