Ontology-based Approach for Interoperability of Digital Collections

This paper presents solutions and lessons learned in the FinnONTO project carried out in Finland in 2003-2007. The paper focuses on three aspects of interoperability of digital collections. First, transforming thesauri to ontologies. Second, publishing ontologies for the use of indexers and content providers. Third, ontology based methods for improving the end user access to digital collections. The first aspect is analysed through case studies done with Finnish thesauri. The second is discussed by presenting the ONKI ontology server. The last aspect is demonstrated in the scope of the semantic portal CultureSampo for publishing cultural heritrage on the Semantic Web.