University of Helsinki
The National Library of Finland has been developing the national thesaurus and ontology service Finto since 2013. Finto’s goal is to provide a centralised source of all the thesauri, ontologies, and classifications needed in annotation. It is a one-stop-shop for publishing and finding the vocabularies and the modern interfaces (APIs) to access them. The project development is being funded by the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Education and Culture.
By Matias Frosterus, Finto Project Manager, the National Library of Finland
Powerful and simple
Ultimately, Finto aims to help with interoperability between metadata from different organisations. One of the requirements for publishing a vocabulary in Finto is for it to have globally unique identifiers (URIs) for all the concepts contained in the vocabulary. Furthermore, these should be resolvable identifiers i.e. ones that lead to more information about the concept. Often this destination can be set to Finto itself but Finto can also publish vocabularies whose URIs resolve to someplace else.
Unique identifiers allow for powerful linking between various vocabularies and other resources. Resolvable links are machine-traversable so that an application can use the links to find out whatever it needs. And since the Finto APIs are common to all the vocabularies published in the service, utilising several and switching between them is simple.
What’s under the bonnet?
Under the bonnet, Finto service is powered by Skosmos – an open source application developed in the National Library. Skosmos is a SKOS vocabulary browser – SKOS being the World Wide Web Consortium’s recommendation for representing thesauri, taxonomies, classifications and light-weight ontologies. Skosmos has garnered positive responses and in addition to Finto, there are a few instances of Skosmos running in various parts of the world.
Skosmos 1.0 was released in February 2015, followed by version 1.1. in May. The development still continues, but Skosmos now fulfills the requirements that were originally set for it. It is fast and reliable and supports all the basic functionalities that are needed. Skosmos has undergone three separate usability test rounds during its development and has been approved according to the standard System Usability Score.
A stamp of approval for Finto
During the year 2015 Finto is being connected to the Finnish National Data Exchange Layer (kansallinen palveluväylä in Finnish). The Layer is essentially a set of practices for relaying information in a standardised way at a low level. It defines a common SOAP API for encoding the messages, provides a secure way of transferring information over the web and deals with fundamentals such as time stamping, logging, federation, etc. The Layer is to form the future basis for the Finnish public sector service infrastructure.
Since Finto adheres to the principles of open linked data and the use of Finto is free, joining the National Data Exchange Layer is of limited impact in the technical sense. In essence, it means that Finto will be available through the SOAP API as well as its own REST API (Representational state transfer).
But the impact is more a matter of principle. Joining the Data Exchange Layer can be seen as a sort of stamp of approval that Finto fulfills the national requirements and is seen as a trusted service. Finto is planned to be among the first services available through the Data Exchange Layer soon after the launch of the Layer in November 2015.
Central to semantic interoperability
Maybe even more importantly, Finto has a central role to play in the pursuit for semantic interoperability in the public sector.
The Data Exchange Layer solves some of the challenges associated with integrating various services and systems at the, as the name implies, data exchange level. But in order to enable true integration, a layer of semantic interoperability is needed and it is at this level that Finto can be seen as being one important piece in the larger puzzle.
Publishing ontologies and thesauri allows for explicit links to common concepts with machine-understandable relations between them. When different organisations use the same identifiers for the same concepts, it makes metadata integration possible at a deeper level.
Next steps
In an even more recent development, the spring 2015 also saw the beginning stages of planning for a common registry of person, family, and organisation names for museums, archives and libraries where Finto is poised to play a key role.
The current plan is to build a master registry of actor data, aggregating all the knowledge possessed by the different sectors. This has been made possible due to the adoption of the common cataloging standard RDA (Resource Description and Access) for depicting actors in libraries as well as in museums and archives in Finland.
Finto would be the service and publication platform for this data but it has to be stressed that the plan is still in its infancy and will be solidified later this year.