MuseumFinland
-- Finnish Museums on the Semantic Web

This thesis explores the possibilities of using the view-based search paradigm to create intelligent search interfaces on the Semantic Web. After surveying several current semantic search techniques, the view-based search paradigm is explained, and argued to fit in a valuable niche in the field. To test the argument, OntoViews, a semantic view-based search portal creation tool was designed and implemented, and eight portals with five vastly different user interfaces were built using it. Based on the results of these experiments, this thesis argues that the paradigm, particularly as implemented in the OntoViews tool provides a strong, extensible and flexible base on which to built semantic search applications. The particular problems faced in applying view-based search for semantic interfaces are noted, along with explanations on how they were solved in the OntoViews architecture. Finally, directions and ideas for future research are presented for both the paradigm and the implementation architecture, respectively.

This article presents the semantic portal MUSEUMFINLAND for publishing heterogeneous museum collections on the Semantic Web. It is shown how museums with their semantically rich and interrelated collection content can create a large, consolidated semantic collection portal together on the web. By sharing a set of ontologies, it is possible to make collections semantically interoperable, and provide the museum visitors with intelligent content-based search and browsing services to the global collection base. The architecture underlying MUSEUMFINLAND separates generic search and browsing services from the underlying application dependent schemas and metadata by a layer of logical rules. As a result, the portal creation framework and software developed has been applied successfully to other domains as well. MUSEUMFINLAND got the Semantic Web Challence Award (second prize) in 2004.

Museum collections contain large amounts of data and semantically rich, mutually interrelated metadata in heterogeneous databases. The publication of museum collections on the web is therefore a very promising application domain for semantic web techniques. We present a semantic web portal called MUSEUMFINLAND - Finnish Museums on the Semantic Web , that contains some 4,000 cultural artifacts from the collections of three museums using three different database schemas and database systems. The system is based on seven RDF(S) ontologies consisting of some 10,000 classes and individuals.

This paper presents a semantic web portal tool ONTOVIEWS for publishing RDF content on the web. ONTOVIEWS provides the portal designer with a content-based search engine server, Ontogator, and a link recommendation system server, Ontodella. The user interface is created by combining these servers with the Apache Cocoon framework. From the end-user s viewpoint, the key idea of ONTOVIEWS is to combine the multi-facet search paradigm, developed within the information retrieval research community, with semantic web RDFS ontologies, and extend the search service with a semantic browsing facility based on ontological reasoning. ONTOVIEWS is presented from the view points of the end user, architecture, and implementation. The implementation described is modular, easily modified and extended, and provides a good practical basis for creating semantic portals on the web. As a proof of concept, application of ONTOVIEWS to a deployed semantic web portal is discussed.

This paper presents the semantic portal MUSEUMFINLAND for publishing museum collections on the Semantic Web. It is shown how museums with their semantically rich and interrelated collection content can create a large, consolidated semantic collection portal together on the web. By semantic web techniques, it is possible to make collections semantically interoparable and provide the museum visitors with inntelligent content-based search and browsing services to the global collection base.

This paper presents a semantic portal, MuseumFinland, for publishing heterogeneous museum collections on the Semantic Web. The application is presented from the viewpoints of the end-user and the museums providing the contents. By semantic Web techniques, it is possible to make collections semantically interoperable and provide museum visitors with intelligent content-based search and browsing services to the global collection base. By using the MuseumFinland approach, the museums with their semantically rich and interrelated collection content can create consolidated semantic collection portals together on the Web.