Linked Data Finland Project set to start
08.12.2011
At the beginning of 2012, Aalto University and the University of Helsinki will start the national Linked Data Finland project, whose aim is to develop the utilisation of the web’s Linked Open Data with the help of the latest semantic web technologies.
The project provides a technical and scientific environment and expertise for the opening and utilisation of public datasets in Finland. The project has a budget of approx. one million euros, and it is supported by a multi-disciplinary consortium consisting of Tekes – the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation – as well as 22 companies and public sector institutions including, e.g., three Finnish ministries.
In the new project, the focus of research and development will be in the production, publication and intelligent web services of semantic open data and metadata. New technology will be developed through several case studies, including Finnish legal data as a semantic service, content management of a media company, data journalism, semantic National Biography of Finland, enrichment of corporate data with news materials, and a semantic map of services in the metropolitan area.
The new project utilises results from previous projects
“The project will receive a flying start on the basis of the long-running National Semantic Web Ontology Project in Finland (FinnONTO), 2003–2012, which includes a developer community of dozens of organisations, the national ontology infrastructure and ONKI services, tools, information resources and experiences from many pilot applications,” says the project director, Professor Eero Hyvönen from Aalto University and the University of Helsinki.
One of the latest megatrends of the World Wide Web is Linked (Open) Data, Web of Data, where web content is combined and utilised by intelligent web services with the help of extensive, open semantic datasets. At the core of the movement are, e.g., DBPedia, a semantic version of Wikipedia, Google’s encyclopaedic Freebase, and more than 200 other datasets linked to these and to each other in the so-called Linked Open Data cloud. The semantic web is a layer of metadata of the traditional web that can help web services “understand” and combine diverse content on the web and thus provide human users with more intelligent and comprehensive services than before.
Further information:
Linked Data Finland project: http://www.seco.tkk.fi/projects/ldf/
Linked Data community: http://linkeddata.org/
Eero Hyvönen, Professor, Research Director
Aalto University, Department of Media Technology; and the University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science
Semantic Computing Research Group
eero.hyvonen [at] aalto [dot] fi
tel. +358 50 384 1618
