ONKI Ontology Service
From Onki
The National Finnish Ontology Service ONKI is a publicly available ontology library that enables Finnish organisations - public, private and non-governmental - to describe their content using explicitly and unambigously identified concepts/terms and publish their content on the Semantic Web.
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[edit] Main Features and Benefits of the ONKI Service
- Up-to-date ontologies. ONKI contains the latest versions of its ontologies, thesauri and vocabularies at a fixed web address.
- Semantically interlinked ontologies. ONKI ontologies constitute a holistic ontology system called KOKO: they are (or will be) interlinked with the General Finnish Upper Ontology YSO, and possibly with other related ontologies. This makes it possible to create, e.g., applications that integrate automatically content from different domains (e.g., agriculture and cultural heritage), while preserving the original intention of the concepts.
- Easy to use. Optimised user-interfaces. ONKI is designed to provide ontologies as ready-to-use services for content indexers and content end-users. The services can easily be integrated with mash-up applications using AJAX and web widgets, or by using Web Service interfaces. User-interfaces are optimised for presenting various ontologies and for different user needs.
- Free of charge and open source. ONKI ontologies and the ONKI service is provided open source and on a free-of-charge basis (with few exceptions) for the end-users. The service is funded in the pilot phase (until the end of 2009) by the national FinnONTO 2.0 project; permanent funding funding schemes for the service are being negotiated.
- Support is avaible. ONKI is supported, maintained, and developed further by the ONKI team, a part of the Semantic Computing Research Group. If you encounter problems or have development suggestions, the ONKI team is more than delighted to answer your questions and receiving your improvement ideas!
[edit] ONKI Users
The ONKI service is targeted especially for the following user groups:
- Ontology developers and publishers. If you develop ontologies, ONKI is a choice for publishing them as services in a cost-efficient way.
- Content indexers. If you use vocabularies for indexing content, the ONKI widget and services can make this much easier.
- Information searchers. ONKI services can boost your search engine with services such as concept finding, semantic disambiguation and query expansion.
[edit] ONKI Functionalities
When publishing a vocabulary on the service, the following ONKI functionalities can immediately be utilized:
- ONKI Indexing Widget. The general ONKI Widget is a text input field that is connected to the ONKI ontology server for searching and fetching concepts from ontologies. It can be integrated to browser based content management systems to add ontology capabilities to existing legacy systems in a few minutes. Read more.
- ONKI Browser. When a more extensive view is needed for getting a more detailed view on the ontologies, a full screen ONKI browser is available. Currently three different ONKI Browser versions exist: a class ontology browser, a geographical ontology browser and a browser for people and organisations. Read more.
- ONKI Web Service. The ONKI service can be integrated to existing applications also on the software level by using the ONKI Web Service interface. Read more.
[edit] ONKI Architecture
The ONKI service consists of many components which are depicted below:
More information about ONKI components: ONKI SKOS, ONKI Geo, ONKI People.
[edit] Publication Service
The front page of the ONKI service contains a listing of all available vocabularies at the moment. A new vocabulary can be published using ONKI with very little configuration work, if it conforms to the SKOS format of the W3C or is in simple RDF Schema format.
If you have such a vocabulary available and would like to try it out with ONKI, please contact the ONKI team.
[edit] More Information
Mor information and publications about ONKI and the technical and social innovations behind the system can be be found on the ONKI project page.
