Public defence in Media Technology, M.Sc. (Tech) Matias Frosterus

Title of the doctoral thesis: Building Ontology and Data Infrastructure for Semantic Web Applications

Opponent: Professor Marcia Lei Zeng, Kent State University, USA
Custos: Professor Eero Hyvönen, Aalto University School of Science, Department of Computer Science

The thesis is publicly displayed 10 days before the defence in the publication archive Aaltodoc of Aalto University.

Electronic thesis

Public defence announcement:

Finding information is one of the most important functions of modern computing. A key component in enabling this is metadata which records crucial details of the data helping search engines offer users more relevant results. Semantic Web and Linked Data are paradigms that aim to make metadata machine-processable and -understandable. This dissertation explores ways of employing those paradigms to traditional high-quality metadata that has been produced for a very long time in, e.g., cultural heritage organizations. 

The main questions discussed revolve around converting traditional thesauri into linked data vocabularies and how a collection of these vocabularies can be used and maintained as a cohesive knowledge graph. Furthermore, the dissertation considers how the metadata created using the original thesauri can be published and made findable as linked data. Finally, the value to the end-user is considered by enabling better search capabilities through the use of the linked data vocabularies. 

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.