Building Ontology and Data Infrastructure for Semantic Web Applications

Semantic Web and Linked Data are paradigms aiming for more efficient and more sophisticated knowledge management through machine-understandable semantics and functional links between entities and relations present in data. Central to this idea is the concept of ontologies: knowledge structures explicitly describing the concepts of a certain domain in a machine-processable way. This dissertation explores ways of developing ontologies from existing thesauri which have been used to produce high-quality metadata for a very long time and how those ontologies can be used in information retrieval. The main research methods used are design science and action research. Extensive application to practice has been used to demonstrate the viability of the proposed solutions. The key results in the dissertation comprise of methods for creating and maintaining a linked open cloud of ontologies and then utilizing those ontologies in linked data publication and for improving semantic search. The primary focus is on data that has been annotated using legacy thesauri that then have been converted into ontologies and the benefits afforded by that. The semantic search techniques employ document expansion using the relations between concepts provided by the ontologies and improvements to information retrieval results are demonstrated. Primary domains explored are related to cultural heritage but the dissertation includes a case study where the methods are implemented for juridical data, as well. The research pioneered in this dissertation has been widely adopted into use in Finnish libraries, archives, museums, and public administration through the national Finto ontology service maintained by the National Library of Finland.

Department dc:contributor.department

Tietotekniikan laitos

Grantor dc:publisher

Aalto University

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Frosterus, Matias

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Tuominen, Jouni, Dr., Aalto University, Finland
• Hyvönen, Eero, Prof., Aalto University, Department of Computer Science, Finland

Contributors dc:contributor

• Aalto-yliopisto
• Aalto University

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/120411

OAI record oai:identifier

https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/server/oai/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=dim&identifier=oai%3Aaaltodoc.aalto.fi%3A123456789%2F120411