ONKI for Beginners
From Onki
Thank you for choosing ONKI! This guide describes how you can start using the ONKI Ontology Service in your application.
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[edit] What is ONKI?
ONKI is a service for 1) publishing vocabularies on the semantic web, and 2) using them as services in applications in a cost-effective way. ONKI with its ontologies is the basis for the national semantic web content infrastructure being developed in Finland by the FinnONTO projects in 2003-2007 and 2008-2010.
See the general description of the ONKI Ontology Service for more details.
[edit] Try the ONKI Browsers
To get a feeling about what the ontologies are and what services ONKI provides, please browse around a few ontologies found in the ONKI Ontology Index. To get a first glance on the ontologies, we recommend looking at the General Finnish Upper Ontology YSO using the ONKI Browser located at:
Please try to search for concepts (e.g., "technology") both by making text searches on the left and by browsing the ontology hierarchy in the middle and on the right. Please notice that each concept has a Uniform Resource Identifier, or URI, which is the unique identifier for the current concept. E.g., the URI of technology is:
http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p2339
All ontologies do not consist of general concepts such as "immaterial" or "technology" but describe (more or less) individuals, such as geographical locations (Helsinki), organisations such as Nokia, or people such as Jean Sibelius. To address the needs of using and accessing different kind of ontologies, following special purpose ONKI Browsers has been implemented:
- ONKI SKOS for SKOS vocabularies and light weight RDFS/OWL class ontologies
- ONKI Geo for geographical place ontologies
- ONKI People for people and organization ontologies
Go and try out ONKI Geo and ONKI People, too. For example, try to find the URI for Helsinki in ONKI Geo, and the URI of Jean Sibelius, the composer, in ONKI People.
[edit] Create your ONKI key
In order to use ONKI ontologies in your application, you need to create an ONKI key for using the ONKI Widget and the ONKI Web Services. The Sign Up can be done easily at:
[edit] Install ONKI Widget to Your Application
After this you are ready to go. Instructions and a generator for creating a widget for your application - only 2 lines of Javascript code! - can be found by clicking the link "indexing widget" on the selected ontology in ONKI the ontology index.
[edit] More Information
See e.g. the article Publishing and using ontologies as mash-up services.
