=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1383/paper6
|storemode=property
|title=Deploying National Ontology Services: From ONKI to Finto
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1383/paper6.pdf
|volume=Vol-1383
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/semweb/SuominenPTLNYFH14
}}
==Deploying National Ontology Services: From ONKI to Finto==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1383/paper6.pdf
Deploying National Ontology Services: From ONKI to Finto
Osma Suominen1 , Sini Pessala1 , Jouni Tuominen2 , Mikko Lappalainen1 , Susanna Nykyri1 , Henri Ylikotila1 ,
Matias Frosterus1,2 , Eero Hyvönen2
1
National Library of Finland
2
Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo), Aalto University, Finland
The vision: a national ontology service
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
ontologies—the key functions of ontology libraries [1]. Using ontologies and integrating them in applications is made
easier because different ontologies can accessed via the same user interfaces and APIs.
User groups Finto ontologies are used by both humans and machines. We indentified three human client groups,
with slightly different needs in the user interface: full-time annotators (indexers working at, e.g., libraries and museums),
users performing annotation as part of their other duties (e.g., journalists publishing articles), and ontology developers.
The Finto user interface is designed to serve them all. For machine use and application developers, the service provides a
variety of APIs and documentation for their usage.
Finto service utilizing Skosmos software The development of a successor system for ONKI started within the
FinnONTO Project. The first step was a creation of ONKI Light [5], a lightweight prototype for an ontology browser on
top of a SPARQL endpoint. The software has since evolved into a production system called Skosmos1 , a thesaurus and
vocabulary browser using SKOS and SPARQL, developed at the National Library. Skosmos provides a multilingual user
interface for browsing and searching the data and for visualizing concept hierarchies. The user interface has been developed
by analyzing the results of repeated usability tests. The Finto service2 is set up as a specific installation of Skosmos, but
Skosmos can be used to provide an ontology service anywhere. Finto currently serves more than 400 human visitors per
day, of which 200 are returning users who use the service regularly.
Skosmos relies on a SPARQL endpoint (Apache Jena Fuseki with the jena-text index) as its back-end and is written
mainly in PHP. The main benefits of using a SPARQL endpoint is that the data provided by the service is always up to
date. This allows fast update cycles in vocabulary development. Vocabularies are pre-processed using Skosify [6] to ensure
that they are valid SKOS. The source code is available under the MIT license.
Machine access to concepts The ONKI system offers machine access to ontologies not only by publishing Linked
Data, but also custom APIs more suited for integration to e.g. document and collection management systems. ONKI
provides three main APIs: a SOAP API, a HTTP API, and a JavaScript widget [7]. These have been integrated to
systems used in museums, archives and libraries. For Finto and Skosmos, a new native REST API3 providing RDF/XML,
Turtle or JSON-LD serializations was developed and API wrapper code implemented to support the ONKI APIs. The
ONKI system is still available for browsing ontologies, but API calls to ONKI were redirected to Finto in June 2014. The
Finto API serves more than 100,000 accesses on a busy day, while the old APIs receive around 10,000 hits.
1
https://github.com/NatLibFi/Skosmos
2
http://finto.fi
3
http://api.finto.fi
Ontologies in ONKI and Finto At the heart of ONKI/Finto lies the General Finnish Ontology YSO. The National
Library took over the development of YSO in 2013. Since then, special attention has been paid to making YSO intuitive
and user-friendly without losing the benefits of machine-readable semantic data. The top-level ontology has been reworked,
multilingual aspects have been refined, and work is under way to link YSO to the Library of Congress Subject Headings
(LCSH). The original OWL representation was changed to SKOS, with some extensions mainly from ISO 259644 .
During the FinnONTO project, many YSO-based domain ontologies were created in collaboration with expert orga-
nizations. YSO is used as the central hub or glue relating all the domain ontologies to one another while minimizing the
number of direct links between them. The aim here is to facilitate distributed development of the domain ontologies in the
expert organizations while allowing the domain ontology developers to worry only about links and changes to one other
ontology. Their content is aggregated into the single unified ontology KOKO [2].
The work on this harmonized cloud of interlinked ontologies was begun during FinnONTO and has now been continued
at the National Library. The ultimate goal is to use KOKO to relate the annotations in the datasets of the various
organizations facilitating interoperability and breaking down silos. KOKO has been in pilot use as an annotation vocabulary
in, e.g., various museums and in the National Broadcasting Company YLE – i.e., in organizations that potentially deal
with material from all possible domains.
In addition to YSO, KOKO and the YSO-based domain ontologies, a number of thesauri, classifications and other con-
trolled vocabularies have been published in Finto, including Medical Subject Headings5 , Iconclass6 , and Lexvo7 language
codes. As of July 2014, 27 vocabularies are available and more are being prepared for publishing.
Experiences during deployment
The process of transitioning users from ONKI to Finto has generally been smooth. The ONKI name has already been used
for several related but distinct initiatives, so the name Finto was chosen for the new service to avoid confusion. The Finto
user interface has undergone multiple rounds of usability testing and is already well liked by users, but the implementation
could be further improved in terms of speed and scalability. The bottleneck is usually the SPARQL endpoint, especially
for non-exact label matches where the text index cannot always be used effectively.
The transition from ONKI APIs to Finto was managed by testing the new wrapper implementations both internally
and among major user organizations well in advance of their deployment. Nevertheless, there were some problems that had
to be resolved after the transition, e.g., browser cache and SSL issues. Since Finto hosts newer versions of some ontologies
including YSO and KOKO, users were simultaneously introduced to new versions, which caused some compatibility issues.
The change from OWL to SKOS caused some API queries to break, and the new version of KOKO was also different both
in terms of content and modeling. However, the transitioning problems were generally resolved in less than a week. In
future, we expect similar migration issues as ontologies evolve and new versions are published, but the changes are likely
to be incremental in nature.
In future, we expect some growth in the usage of the Finto service, as well as more systems integrated to use the API
services. We also expect other organizations to deploy their own Skosmos instances for publishing their own vocabularies.
References
1. d’Aquin, M., Noy, N.F.: Where to publish and find ontologies? a survey of ontology libraries. Web Semantics: Science, Services
and Agents on the World Wide Web 11, 96–111 (2012)
2. Frosterus, M., Tuominen, J., Pessala, S., Seppälä, K., Hyvönen, E.: Linked Open Ontology Cloud KOKO—managing a system of
cross-domain lightweight ontologies. In: The Semantic Web: ESWC 2013 Satellite Events. pp. 296–297. Springer-Verlag, Berlin
Heidelberg (May 26–30 2013)
3. Hyvönen, E., Viljanen, K., Tuominen, J., Seppälä, K.: Building a National Semantic Web Ontology and Ontology Service
Infrastructure—The FinnONTO Approach. In: Proc. of the European Semantic Web Conf. (ESWC 2008). Springer-Verlag (2008)
4. Lappalainen, M., Frosterus, M., Nykyri, S.: Reuse of library thesaurus data as ontologies for the public sector. In: IFLA WLIC
2014 (August 16–22 2014)
5. Suominen, O., Johansson, A., Ylikotila, H., Tuominen, J., Hyvönen, E.: Vocabulary services based on SPARQL endpoints: ONKI
Light on SPARQL. In: Poster proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge
Management (EKAW 2012) (October 2012)
6. Suominen, O., Mader, C.: Assessing and improving the quality of SKOS vocabularies. J. on Data Semantics 3(1), 47–73 (2014)
7. Tuominen, J., Frosterus, M., Viljanen, K., Hyvönen, E.: ONKI SKOS Server for Publishing and Utilizing SKOS Vocabularies
and Ontologies as Services. In: Proc. of the European Semantic Web Conf. (ESWC 2009). Springer-Verlag (2009)
8. Viljanen, K., Tuominen, J., Hyvönen, E.: Ontology libraries for production use: The Finnish ontology library service ONKI. In:
Proc. of the European Semantic Web Conf. (ESWC 2009). Springer–Verlag (2009)
4
http://www.niso.org/schemas/iso25964/
5
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/
6
http://iconclass.org
7
http://lexvo.org