Tuukka Ruotsalo

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 method for making metadata conforming to heterogeneous schemas semantically interoperable. The idea is to make the knowledge embedded in the schema structures interoperable and explicit by transforming the schemas into a shared, event-based representation of knowledge about the real world. This enables and simplifies accurate reasoning services such as cross-domain semantic search, browsing, and recommending. A case study of transforming three different schemas and datasets is presented. An implemented knowledge-based recommender system utilizing the results in the semantic portal \CS\ was found useful in a preliminary user study.

In current Semantic Web view-based search systems views are formed by selecting properties and enumerating all their values as selections. This approach breaks down with multiple content types, such as in the cultural heritage domain, because the number of differing properties, and therefore views becomes unmanageable. We propose a novel solution termed Domain-Centric View-Based Search, in which views are created based on common property ranges and domain ontologies.

This paper shortly presents an automatic exhibition generation interface that turns the focus of semantic search from search items to the concepts they are annotated with.

An event-based approach is presented for annotating events and narrative structures underlying texts and stories semantically. The idea is applied to using the Finnish national epic Kalevala for accessing related cultural contents, such as artifacts, paintings etc. in a semantic portal.

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.