The Semantic Computing research group - SeCo
During 2005, the SeCo group worked with two projects. Ontologies of the semantic web in Finland (FinnONTO) is a national research project to develop broad Finnish open-source ontologies for the semantic web, and the maintenance tools and applications for them, as well as to demonstrate the new technology through several pilot applications. The project is a part of the Fenix research programme of Tekes, and is financed by 28 different partners, private and public. Over eighty percent of the research has been carried out by the Semantic computing research group, with contributions from the Tampere University Department of Information Studies, the Helsinki University Department of Linguistics, and the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformatics at Helsinki University of Technology.
On the ontologies front, the VALO ontology of photography was finalised. The first version of a general Finnish ontology, YSO (Yleinen suomalainen ontologia), based on a general Finnish terminology collection, will be finished early in 2006. A demonstration of a Finnish temporal space ontology was carried out, and an inference machine was developed for historic space data.
On the tools front, development efforts concentrated on the national ontology server ONKI, for which the first prototype was finished, on the annotation editor SAHA that will soon be on trial, and the POKA tool for half-automated annotation. The pilot applications developed by the project group include the award-winning portal “MuseoSuomi – Suomen museot semanttisessa webissä” (MuseumFinland – Finnish Museums on the Semantic Web), and its further development, “KulttuuriSampo – Suomen kulttuuri semanttisessä webissä” (CultureSampo – Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web), which was prototyped in 2005.The Klaffi portal of the Finnish national public service broadcasting company (YLE Oy) containing video clips and teaching material was developed into the semantic Orava portal, which was combined with MuseumFinland. The production of a portal for the bettering of public health was started in 2005.
The Intelligent Web Services project, which ended in autumn 2005, was part of the Fenix research programme of Tekes. The project partners included Fonecta, Stakes (the National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health), TeliaSonera, TietoEnator and the Ministry of Finance. The main focus of the project was to create service indexes like the yellow pages by combining the semantic web and web services. Further, the project worked out ontologies for social and healthcare services and the eGovernment field.
The main results of the project include a group of ontologies and methods needed for the semantic description of services, the OntoViews tool for the generation of semantic portals, and the semantic portals created with this tool. Among these portals, the main ones are the semantic search portal Veturi, created for the material in the Fonecta Oy 020202.fi service and the Stakes service for the elderly, as well as the semantic SW-suomi.fi portal based on the contents of the suomi.fi portal of the Ministry of Finance.
Homepage: http://www.seco.tkk.fi/
Contact person: Professor Eero Hyvönen
Publications
Hyvönen E. & Mäkelä E. & Salminen M. & Valo A. & Viljanen K. & Saarela S. & Junnila M. & Kettula S.
MuseumFinland - Finnish Museums on the Semantic Web. Journal of Web Semantics, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 25, 2005.
Kauppinen T. & Hyvönen E.
Modeling and Reasoning about Changes in Ontology Time Series. Ontologies in the Context of Information Systems (Rajiv Kishore, Ram Ramesh and Raj Sharman (eds.)), Springer-Verlag , Berlin , Dec, 2005. In press.
Hyvönen E. & Valo A. & Komulainen V. & Seppälä K. & Kauppinen T. & Ruotsalo T. & Salminen M. & Ylisalmi A.
Finnish National Ontologies for the Semantic Web - Towards a Content and Service Infrastructure. Proceedings of International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications (DC 2005), Nov, 2005.
Mäkelä E. & Hyvönen E. & Sidoroff T.
View-Based User Interfaces for Information Retrieval on the Semantic Web. Proceedings of the ISWC-2005 Workshop End User Semantic Web Interaction, Nov, 2005.
Semantic E-goverment Portals - A Case Study. Proceedings of the ISWC-2005 Workshop Semantic Web Case Studies and Best Practices for eBusiness SWCASE05, Nov, 2005.