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The Finnish Geo-Ontology (SUO) defines concepts that correspond to 1) things from the physical and social world having a location on the surface of the Earth and 2) semantic and spatial relations (i.e. topology and mereology) between these things. Each of these concepts are associated with discrete geographic object (i.e. point, curve, or polygon) which has an exact position with respect to some coordinate reference system.  


SUO is based on two geographic gazetteers, namely 1) Finnish Place Name Registry, maintained by the Finnish National Land Survey, and 2) The GEOnet Names Server (GNS), maintained by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names; altogether SUO contains ca. 5 million place instances categorized ca. in 850 different classes. 


The development of SUO has been strongly influenced by traditional geographic discipline. It distinguishes areas, regions, man-made structures and natural features from each other thus providing a convenient means to the content annotators to annotate their place-related resources. SUO has also been aligned to The Finnish General Upper Ontology YSO.