Jussi Kurki

Authors and documents with identical titles are common in the digital library environment. In order to manage identities correctly, authority control is used by library and information scientists for disam- biguating and cross-referencing entity names. We argue that the benefits of traditional authority control can be enhanced by using techniques and technologies of the Semantic Web, leading to simpler management of multiple languages, better linkability of resources, simpler reuse of au- thority registries in applications, and less work in indexing. To demon- strate our propositions, we have created a prototype of an ontology server and service called ONKI People that is used in two ways: First, it is a centralized authority service providing human end-users with efficient and easy to use authority finding and disambiguation services based on faceted semantic search and visualizations. The services are available on- line also as AJAX and Web Services API for machines to use. Second, the underlying RDF triple store can be used as a content resource in ap- plications such as semantic cultural heritage portals. The paper discusses and demonstrates both use cases in a real life setting.

This paper presents the national level cross-domain ontology and ontology service infrastructure ONKI used in Finland. The novelty of ONKI is based on two ideas. First, the core ontologies are developed collaboratively by experts transforming thesauri into mutually aligned lightweight ontologies, based on a large top ontology that is extended by various domain specific ontologies. Second, the National Ontology Service ONKI has been implemented for publishing ontologies cost-efficiently as ready to use services. ONKI provides legacy and other applications with ready to use functionalities for using ontologies on the HTML level by Ajax and semantic widgets. ONKI has been used in various applications for creating mash-up applications in a way analogous to using Google Maps, but in our case external applications are mashed-up with ontology support for indexing and information retrieval.

Finding people is essential in finding information. Librarians and information scientists have studied authority control - psychologists and sociologists social networks. In aforementioned, authors link to documents (and co-authors) creating access points to information. In latter, social paths serve as channels for rumours as well as expertise. Key problems include identification and disambiguation of individuals followed by difficulties of tracking the social connections. With semantic web, these aspects can be approached simultaneously. In this paper, we define a simple ontology for describing people and organizations. The model is based on FOAF and other existing vocabularies. We also demonstrate search and visualization tools for finding people.

This paper presents the semantic portal CULTURESAMPO---Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web . The portal provides memory organizations and other cultural content publishers with a national, shared semantic publication channel for heteroge- nous cultural contents. The content comes from over ten organizations and is annotated using various ontologies of the FinnONTO infrastructure. For the end-user, intel- ligent semantic search, recommendation, and visualization services for accessing and learning about cultural heritage are provided.

A lot of functionality is needed when an application, such as a museum cataloguing system, is extended with semantic capabilities, for example ontological indexing functionality or multi-facet search. To avoid duplicate work and to enable easy and cost-efficient integration of information systems with the Semantic Web, we propose a web widget approach. Here, data sources are combined with functionality into readyto-use software components that allow adding semantic functionality to systems with just a few lines of code. As a proof of the concept, we present a collection of general semantic web widgets and case applications that use them, such as the ontology server ONKI, the annotation editor SAHA and the culture portal CultureSampo.

This paper presents a system for searching semantic relations between web resources, in our case significant persons of art history. The system is based on the Union List of Artists Names (ULAN) metadata of some 120,000 persons and organizations.

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.