Creating a National Content and Service Infrastructure for the Semantic Web

We present a national ontology development and service framework being developed in Finland in 2003-2007. Our goal is to initiate and support collaborative ontology development processes of various expert groups now developing keyword thesauri. The framework is based on a set of related core ontologies, most notably on a national upper ontology based on the commonly used Finnish General Thesaurus YSA. The framework implements three ontology services by a web-based system ONKI. Firstly, ONKI supports distributed collaborative development and versioning of interdependent ontologies. Secondly, external cataloging and indexing systems can use ONKI as a web service for ontology-based annotations. Thirdly, information retrieval systems can use ONKI for disambiguating keyword meanings for concept-based search on the Semantic Web.