This paper generalizes the idea of traditional syntactic text autocompletion onto the semantic level. The idea is to autocomplete typed text into ontological categories instead of words in a vocabulary. The idea has been implemented and its application for semantic indexing and content-based information retrieval in multi-facet search is proposed. Four operational semantic portals on the web using the implementation are presented as application cases. 1

Abstract. This paper presents the vision and results of creating a national level cross-domain ontology and ontology service infrastructure in Finland. The novelty of the infrastructure is based on two ideas. First, a system of open source core ontologies is being developed by transforming thesauri into mutually aligned lightweight ontologies, including a large top ontology that is extended by various domain specific ontologies. Second, the ONKI Ontology Server framework for publishing ontologies as ready to use services has been designed and implemented. ONKI provides legacy and other applications with ready to use functionalities for using ontologies on the HTML level by Ajax and semantic widgets. The idea is to use ONKI for creating mash-up applications in a way analogous to using Google or Yahoo Maps, but in our case external applications are mashed-up with ontology support. 1 A National Ontology Infrastructure The ambitious goal of the National Semantic Web Ontology project (FinnONTO 2003–2007) 1 [1] is to develop a semantic web infrastructure on a national level in Finland. The consortium behind the initiative—37 companies and public organizations—represents a wide spectrum of functions of the society, including libraries, health organizations, cultural institutions, government, media, and education. The project has produced a variety of scientific results, specifications, services, demonstrations, and applications: 1. Metadata standards. Nationally adapted standards for representing metadata in various application fields have been created, e.g. JHS 158 2 and [2]. 2. Core ontologies. Several core ontologies 3 have been developed in order to initiate ontology development processes in Finland.

Metadata creation is one of the major challenges in developing the Semantic Web. This paper discusses how to make provision of metadata easier and costeffective by an annotation editor combined with shared ontology services. We have developed an annotation system supporting distributed collaboration in creating annotations, and hiding the complexity of the annotation schema and the domain ontologies from the annotators. Our system adapts flexibly to different metadata schemas, which makes it suitable for different applications. Support for using ontologies is based on ontology services, such as concept searching and browsing, concept URI fetching, semantic autocompletion and linguistic concept extraction. The system is being tested in various practical semantic portal projects.

The Semantic Web is based on using ontologies for enabling semantically disambiguated data exchange between distributed systems on the web. This requires efficient means for publishing ontologies on the web to ensure the availability, sharing and acceptance of the ontologies. Support services are needed for utilizing ontologies easily and costeffectively in applications and legacy systems lacking ontology support. To address these vital needs, this paper presents the ONKI ontology service which provides ready-to-use “mash-up ” functionalities, such as semantic disambiguation, concept finding and concept fetching as readyto-use web widgets for adding ontology support to e.g. HTML forms using JavaScript. Two implementations of the ONKI Server are presented: ONKI-SKOS for ontologies presented in the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) language and ONKI-Geo for geographical ontologies with a map interface. The presented ONKI systems are operational on the web, used in the National Finnish Ontology Service. They

This paper shows how semantic web techniques can be applied to solving problems of distributed content creation, discovery, linking, aggregation, and reuse in health information portals, both from end-users ’ and content publishers’ viewpoints. As a case study, the national semantic health portal HEALTH-FINLAND is presented. It provides citizens with intelligent searching and browsing services to reliable and up-to-date health information created by various health organizations in Finland. The system is based on a shared semantic metadata schema, ontologies, and ontology services. The content includes metadata about thousands of web documents such as web pages, articles, reports, campaign information, news, services, and other information related to health.

This paper presents a prototype of an ontology-based semantic annotation tool Saha. The tool eases the process of creating ontological descriptions of documents by providing a simple user interface that hides the complexity of ontologies from annotators. Saha is used with a web browser, and it supports collaborative distributed creation of metadata by centrally storing annotations, which can be viewed and edited by different annotators. Concepts defined in external ontologies can be imported and used in annotations by connecting Saha to ontology servers. The tool is being tested in practical semantic portal projects. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.1 [Information storage and retrieval]: Content Analysis

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. 1 A Semantic Content Infrastructure The Semantic Web 1 is based on a metadata layer that describes the contents and services on the web in a machine “understandable ” way based on ontologies [5, 34]. The idea from the application viewpoint is simple: if the machine understands the contents and services it is dealing with, then better interoperability of web systems can be obtained and intelligent services provided to the end-users. This papers argues that a conceptual “semantic content infrastructure ” is needed for the semantic web, 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 shared infrastructure would make it much easier and cheaper for public organizations and companies to create interoperable, intelligent services on the coming semantic web. In our view, the infrastructure should be open source and its central components be maintained by the public sector in order to guarantee wide usage and interoperability across different application domains and user communities. 1

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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.

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 mash-up approach. Here, data sources are combined with functionality into ready-to-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 mash-up components and case applications that use them, such as the ontology server ONKI, the annotation editor SAHA and the culture portal CultureSampo.