Abstract A major source of interoperability problems on the Semantic Web is the different vocabularies used in metadata descriptions. This paper argues that instead of solving interoperability problems we should focus more effort on avoiding the problems in the first place, in the spirit of Albert Einstein&apos;s quote &quot;Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them&quot;. For this purpose, coordinated collaborative development of open source vocabularies and centralized publication of them as public vocabulary services are proposed. Methods, guidelines, and tools to facilitate this have been developed on a national level in the Finnish FinnONTO initiative, and are now in pilot use with applications and promising first results

Eero Hyvönen

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Preventing Interoperability Problems Instead of Solving Them 
Eero Hyvönen 
Aalto University, School of Science and Technology, and University of Helsinki 
Semantic Computing Research Group 
http://www.seco.tkk.fi, first.last@tkk.fi  
Abstract 
A major source of interoperability problems on the Semantic Web is the different vocabularies 
used in metadata descriptions. This paper argues that instead of solving interoperability problems 
we should focus more effort on avoiding the problems in the first place, in the spirit of Albert 
Einstein's quote "Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them". For this purpose, 
coordinated collaborative development of open source vocabularies and centralized publication of 
them as public vocabulary services are proposed. Methods, guidelines, and tools to facilitate this 
have been developed on a national level in the Finnish FinnONTO initiative, and are now in pilot 
use with applications and promising first results. 
1. Interoperability of Vocabularies 
Much of the power of the Web comes from the freedom for anybody to publish and link own 
content on the web as the Web of Pages. When moving into the era of the Semantic Web, the 
Web of  (Linked) Data, content is being linked on the level of ontological concepts and metadata 
underlying the pages1 (Bizer et al., 2009) This leads to interoperability problems, especially 
interoperability regarding metadata schemas and vocabularies used for filling element values in 
the schemas. Approaches to schema interoperability include the dumb-down principle, as 
suggested in the Dublin Core community2, and using a shared schema ontology onto which other 
metadata representations can be transformed, as suggested e.g. by the CIDOC CRM and FRBR 
communities3. In contrast, this paper focuses on interoperability problems due to domain 
vocabularies (ontologies) used in annotations. 
Content aggregated in semantic portals or on the web scale in the Linked Data initiative comes 
from actors and organizations that produce content for their own purposes and come from 
different disciplines, cultures, and countries. As a result, lots of different, partly overlapping 
vocabularies are used in metadata descriptions. To approach the interoperability problems, 
various techniques of ontology matching (mapping) (Euzenat, Shvaiko, 2007) are used. For 
example, lots of mappings based on the owl:sameAs relation have been created for the resources 
in the Linked Data cloud. There are, for example, mappings between the place resources of 
DBPedia and Geonames. A key problem here is how to deal with situations, where multiple entity 
names and identifiers are used for a single real world object (Bouquet et al., 2008), and where 
different objects have the same name or identifier. The same problem is encountered in Web 2.0 
sites, where tagging using literals without identified meaning is causing more and more semantic 
confusions as more and more tags are being created (e.g. "jaguar" as a car model, animal, and 
airplane). 
2. Coordinated Collaboration for Vocabulary Creation 
The mess of meaning references on the metadata level on the Semantic Web creates lots of 
interesting research problems to study.Most research on interoperability issues seems to be 
focusing on developing methods and tools for obtaining interoperability between heterogeneous 
                                                     
1 http://linkeddata.org/ 
2 http://dublincore.org/ 
3 http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/ 
2 
annotations (e.g. the datasets of the Linked Data initiative). However, from a non-academic 
practical viewpoint, this is a problem that should be avoided in the first place as far as possible. 
Obviously, more research effort should be focused on developing methods, tools, and practices by 
which metadata could be produced on a larger scale in an interoperable way at the time of 
creating it. Instead of solving interoperability problems we should rather try to prevent them by 
better ontology services, coordination, and collaboration in ontology development and content 
creation. 
FinnONTO 2003-2012 is a research project and a Living Laboratory experiment (Hyvönen et al., 
2008; Hyvönen, 2009), where the idea is to establish a collaboration framework for vocabulary 
development and services on a national level for the Semantic Web. The main goal of FinnONTO 
is to create an open source, national level cross-domain "content infrastructure" for the Semantic 
Web, aligned with international vocabularies, standards, and practices. This infrastructure and 
network of concepts can be paralleled, on a conceptual level, with the construction of railroad, 
electrical, or telephone networks in the past. 
The work is based on the domain independent Semantic Web standards4 of the W3C, such as 
RDF, SKOS, OWL, and SPARQL, but the hearth of the system is domain-specific ontologies. 
While standardization work at W3C focuses on defining general principles of ontological 
structuring and reasoning, such as subsumption and inheritance, the general goal of FinnONTO is 
to facilitate cross-domain interoperability of metadata descriptions on a domain-specific 
vocabulary level. The idea is that when content is published on the web, it should be possible to 
connect it semantically with other related (cross-domain) contents based on a system of mutually 
aligned domain ontologies. 
The vocabulary infrastucture has been built by transforming nationally used traditional keyword 
thesauri into light-weight ontologies, which makes the ontologies interoperable with already 
indexed content in databases. A key goal in the work is to encourage collaboration between 
ontology developers of different domains by proving a general FinnONTO ontology framework 
in which new vocabularies can aligned already during the ontologization process, instead of 
afterwards. The kernel of the FinnONTO system (Hyvönen, 2008) is the General Finnish 
Ontology YSO developed from the widely used General Finnish Thesaurus YSA that consists of 
some 25,000 general concepts and that is maintained by the National Library. The corresponding 
ontology YSO has been extended by various domain-specific daughter ontologies, based on other 
national thesauri used in domains such cultural heritage, agriculture and forestry, applied arts, 
places, photography, and others. These ontologies create together virtually one ontology, the 
Collaborative Holistic Ontology KOKO, that now has over 70,000 general concepts, excluding 
ontologies such as places, mammals, persons, historical events, or birds of the world.5 
3. Commandments for Social Vocabulary Development 
The key idea in the ontologization process is to aim at a system of vocabularies that are born 
interoperable with each other. To facilitate this, a new thesaurus is first matched with the general 
YSO top ontology in order to identify potential overlaps. The result is a Protégé-editor6 project 
that includes YSO and the new thesaurus concepts. This structure is then corrected and 
maintained manually. (Alignment with other overlapping ontologies is also possible in a similar 
way.) In this way, the work already done in YSO can be reused in daughter ontologies and, at the 
same time, interoperability is enhanced by collaboration. 
                                                     
4 http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/ 
5 http://www.seco.tkk.fi/ontologies/ 
6 http://protege.stanford.edu/ 
3 
Vocabulary work in our view is as much a social process as it is a technical challenge. The work 
is guided by the following ten commandments: 1) Add machine semantics. Start transforming 
thesauri into machine interpretable (lightweight) ontologies in order to boost their usage on the 
Semantic Web. 2) Think cross-domain. Consider not only your own micro world, but also cross-
domain usage of concepts when making ontological decisions. 3) Establish collaboration 
networks of domain expert groups. Nobody masters the whole universe. 4) Reuse the others’ 
work. 5) Maintain interoperability with the past and other ontologies. Otherwise benefits of 
collaboration are lost. 6) Proceed in small steps. Adding even little semantics can be very useful 
(and keeps e.g. the funding agencies happy). 7) Respect different ontological views. It is not 
possible to come up with only one ontological view of the world. 8) Accept imperfect models. 
The ontology will never be fully perfect. 9) Minimal ontological commitment. Keep onto-logical 
structures simple and generic in order to facilitate cross-domain reuse. 10) Coordinate the work 
and add new commandments if needed. This is done now by the FinnONTO research project but 
later, if the project is successful, by another coordinating organization. 
4. Vocabulary Services for Legacy Systems 
Another key component of the FinnONTO infrastructure is the National Ontology Service ONKI7 
(Viljanen et.al., 2009) hosting currently 79 ontologies and vocabularies. The idea is provide the 
vocabularies as a free service for both human and machine users to utilize. ONKI ontology 
services such as concept finding, browsing, fetching, and query expansion (Tuominen et al., 
2009ab) can be integrated with legacy systems though REST, Web Service, or AJAX  APIs in a 
way that is analogous to using Google Maps as an external service in applications. We hope that 
by making vocabulary services available and usable in an economically motivating way, 
organizations and people start using shared ONKI vocabularies and URIs, preventing 
interoperability problems raising form using local or depreciated vocabularies. Other ontology 
servers on the web with the goal of publishing and sharing ontologies in public include Cupboard 
(d'Aquin, 2009) and BioPortal (Musen et al., 2009). 
5. Evaluation 
The feasibility of the FinnONTO approach is tested and demonstrated in practice by applications, 
such as the collaborative semantic portals MuseumFinland8, HealthFinland9, and CultureSampo10 
(Hyvönen et al., 2009) that makes use of the whole KOKO system aligned with some 
international vocabularies, such as the Getty vocabularies11 AAT, TGN, and ULAN. In summer 
2009, 150 organizations in Finland and abroad had been registered to use ONKI services, and 
new ontologized vocabularies in the system have been developed by external organizations, e.g. 
an ontology for maritime and literature content (KAUNO). The latter one that has been used, 
based on ONKI services, for annotating 55,000 pieces of Finnish novels in a Web 2.0 fashion by 
Finnish librarians for a semantic literature portal12. In HealthFinland metadata is being created 
using the ONKI ontologies and services by a variety of national health organizations, and the 
system is production use since 2009 (Suominen et al., 2010).  
Our own experience suggests that gaining semantic interoperability in terms of vocabularies is a 
very tedious task and hinders fast publication cycle form legacy databases to Web. In 
                                                     
7 http://www.onki.fi/ 
8 http://www.museosuomi.fi/ 
9 http://www.tervesuomi.fi/ 
10 http://www.kulttuurisampo.fi/ 
11 http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/ 
12 http://www.kirjasampo.fi/ 
4 
CultureSampo, for example, the content is heterogeneous and harvested from tens of memory 
organizations of different kinds producing heterogeneous content. This vocabulary 
interoperability problem should in our mind definitely be addressed seriously at the time and 
place of content creation, not after harvesting the content, and we hope that the FinnONTO 
infrastructure is a step towards facilitating this in practice. Changing the practices and adapting 
software in legacy to use ontologies cannot happen instantly but only in time. However, we 
believe there is now a road ahead to go. 
References 
d'Aquin, M., Lewen, H.: Cupboard - a place to expose your ontologies to applications and the 
community. In: Proceedings of the 6th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2009), 
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C. Bizer, T. Heath, T. Berners-Lee. Linked Data - The Story So Far. In: Journal of Semantic Web 
and Information Systems, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2009. 
Paolo Bouquet, Heiko Stoermer, Claudia Niederee, and Antonio Mana. Entity Name System: The 
Backbone of an Open and Scalable Web of Data. In Proceedings of the IEEE International 
Conference on Semantic Computing, ICSC 2008, number CSS-ICSC 2008-4-28-25, pages 554-
561. IEEE Computer Society, August 2008. 
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Palonen, Matias Frosterus, Reetta Sinkkilä, Panu Paakkarinen, Joonas Laitio, Katariina Nyberg: 
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Sheu et al. (eds), Semantic Computing. IEEE Wiley, 2010 (forth-coming).  
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Preventing interoperability problems instead of solving them

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Preventing interoperability problems instead of solving them

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