Deploying national ontology services: From ONKI to Finto

Abstract

In Finland, a major research initiative FinnONTO [3] was carried out in 2003–2012 with the goal of providing a national level semantic web ontology infrastructure based on centralized ontology services. Since 2008, a prototype of such a system, the ONKI Ontology Service [8,7] has been used in a living laboratory experiment with more than 400 daily human visitors and over 400 registered domains using its web services, including the ONKI mash-up widget for annotating content in legacy systems and semantic query expansion. The FinnONTO infrastructure also includes the notion of creating and maintaining a holistic Linked Open Ontology Cloud KOKO that covers different domains, is maintained in a distributed fashion by expert groups in different domains, and is provided as a national centralized service. In 2013 the Ministry of Education and Culture and the Ministry of Finance decided to finance the deployment of ONKI and its key ontologies into a sustainable free national service Finto, created and maintained by the National Library of Finland. Finto was opened in public in January 2014, and the API services of ONKI were redirected to Finto in June. This paper summarizes, from a technical standpoint, major ideas and components underlying Finto and lessons learned during the deployment process. Issues encountered in ontology engineering regarding, e.g., concept analysis and linguistic aspects have been discussed in a separate paper [4]. Deploying ontology services ONKI/Finto supports publication of ontologies by providing a centralized place for finding, accessing, and utilizing