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History of AI, Semantic Web, and SeCo Research in Finland

Some history of Artificial Intelligence, Semantic Web, and Ontologies in Finland: Towards a Web of Wisdom The National Library of Finland organized a 10th anniversary seminar for its national vocabulary, ontology, and classification service Finto.fi at the end of 2024. I was asked to recall the prehistory of Finto under the title “How did the FinONTO project produce Finto?”, because the idea, prototype, and first ontologies of the service were developed as part of the FinnONTO project series that I led 2003-2022 at the University of Helsinki and Aalto University (formerly the Helsinki University of Technology). The presentation was videotaped by the organizers and is now available on YouTube for those interested in the development and history of the semantic web (In Finnish): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4O3yaSCHE8

The journey towards Finto through Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the semantic web began with the ancient Greeks, especially Aristotle (384-322 BC), who was the first to describe the world as an ontology (10 categories) and mechanize human thinking as logical rules (4 syllogisms). In 1956, the concept of Artificial Intelligence as a research area was born at the legendary workshop at Dartmouth College (USA), with John McCarthy (1927-2011), Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) and others as midwives. I had the opportunity to meet the AI ​​idol McCarthy when I presented my first international paper at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 1983. At that time, the previous golden age of AI research, precedeeding the current AI tsunami, was driven by the ideas of knowledge engineering and expert systems. Inspired by this, we organized the first Finnish Artificial Intelligence research symposium (STeP) in Otaniemi the following year in 1984. One important consequence of this was the founding of the Finnish Artificial Intelligence Society ( STeS) and a series of STeP conferences and multidisciplinary seminars that continued well into the 21st century with topics including philosophy of intelligence, artificial life, SETI research, semantic web, neural networks, etc.). This tradition to spread the gospel of AI, the semantic web, and later Digital Humanities has continued in our Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo). So far approx. 50 open events have been held, in which there have been up to hundreds of participants, the highlights including, e.g., a Finnish-French congress held at the Louvre in Paris in 2005 and the digital humanities HELDIG Summits in the 2010s.

As the symbol for the first AI symposium in 1984, we chose the magic drum of the Lapland shamans, “arpakannus”, which was also adopted as the symbol of the Finnish AI Society and the name of the society's newsletter. The arpakannus drum is perhaps the oldest "computer" in the world: in it, a bone chip (cursor) is placed on the surface of a drum decorated with symbols (screen), and as the shaman drums, the cursor moves from symbol to symbol, answering questions. It is clearly an expert system! According to one interpretation by researchers of the national epic Kalevala, the Sampo stolen from the North (Pohjola) could have been an arpakannus drum. We started forging “sampos” of our own later in the 21st century.

When the World Wide Web (WWW) was invented and developed in the 1990s by the “father of the Web”, Tim Berners-Lee (1955-) and the W3C organization, the idea of ​​an intelligent WWW, a semantic web, which would combine artificial intelligence and WWW technologies, was born at the same time. The idea of ​​an intelligent Semantic Web spread like wildfire around the world in May 2001, thanks to a seminal article by Tim Berners-Lee et al. in Scientific American. At the same autumn, with the support of the newly established HIIT research center of the University of Helsinki (UH) and the Helsinki University of Technology (TKK; now Aalto University), we organized the seminar “Semantic Web Kick-off in Finland 2001” in cooperation with W3C, the Finnish Artificial Intelligence Society, and others. The web industry was booming at the turn of the millennium, and 200 listeners attended. Inspired by the idea of an AI-based Web and the event, I founded the Semantic Computation Research Group (SeCo) at the Department of Computer Science at UH, where the first semantic web research projects were launched after a few months in cooperation and with funding from Tekes (now Business Finland), memory organizations, and companies. In 2005 a new professorship for semantic web technologies was established at TKK, and SeCo moved there, but collaborations with UH have continued and the group have still researchers at both universities.

Our first project created and published online in 2004 one of the first cultural heritage systems in the world based on linked data: “MuseumFinland – Finnish museums in the Semantic Web”, the ancestor of the later Sampo series of systems. MuseumFinland received the Semantic Web Challenge award from the international semantic web research community and Prime Minister’s acknowledgement prize in Finland. Tim Berners-Lee got also interested in the system and asked whether MuseumFinland data could be connected to the international Linked Open Data Cloud, which was then in its infancy. The project also created the vision that in order to develop applications cost-effectively, not only the international W3C technical infrastructure and standards based on logic were needed, but also a national content infrastructure based on ontologies. To implement this vision, a series of FinnONTO projects (2003-2012) was launched, in which the national funding organization Tekes and approximately 50 memory organizations, companies, and public sector organizations eventually participated. One of the key goals of FinnONTO was to create ontologies based on the thesauri and classifications used in Finland in public and university libraries and archives, on the spatial data registers of the Land Survey of Finland and the Centre for Languages in Finland, on historical person registers such as the Finnish Literature Society's National Biography, and on biological taxonomies of the Finnish Museum of Natural History. Ontologies make semantic web data FAIR, i.e., Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. However, the concept of FAIR data was only introduced in 2016 with an article published in the journal Scientific Data. A special ontology service, ONKI.fi, was developed for the centralized distribution of ontologies, which was put into trial use online in 2008. When the FinnONTO project ended in 2013, the plug could no longer be pulled from the wall, because ONKI was already being used by hundreds of customers through its application programming interfaces and browsers in, for example, museum information systems. In ten years, the "point of no return" had been reached. The National Library of Finland deployed from ONKI's ONKI Light version in 2014 the Finto service and its core Skomos tool with funding from the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Culture and Education, who had also been involved in the FinnONTO community. Based on open-source code and the SKOS standard, Skosmos is currently used in several ontology and vocabulary services around the world (UNESCO, FAO, etc.).

After FinnONTO, research and development has continued in the SeCo group at Aalto University and the University of Helsinki. Some special ontologies, such as historical professions and archaeological ontologies have been developed, but the main focus shifted to developing linked open data, knowledge graph applications, and the broader semantic web infrastructure. An important catalyst for the research work has been the HELDIG Centre for Digital Humanities, established in 2016 by seven faculties of the University of Helsinki with the support of the Research Council of Finland. I was invited to become the director in HELDIG and within its network numerous domestic and international linked data projects pertaining to cultural heritage have been launched in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science at the Aalto University. The route ahead that started by MuseumFinland has led to the creation of over 20 linked open data services (SPARQL endpoints) and semantic “Sampo” portals on top of them (CultureSampo, BookSampo, BiographySampo, AcademySampo, ParliamentSampo. LawSampo etc.) – the postfix Sampo is a reminder of the arpakannus drum and the Kalevala epic. Most widely used sampos have had millions of distinct visitors online according to Google Analytics. The work continues today, e.g., as part of the national FIN-CLARIAH (2022-2029) digital humanities research infrastructure program. It combines the European CLARIN and DARIAH infrastructures in a Finnish context, funded by the Research Council of Finland and EU.

The next Sampo to be published in 2025 is Letter Sampo Finland (1809-1917). It is yet another example of the application possibilities of the FIN-CLARIAH infrastructure and was created in collaboration with the Finnish Literature Society and various archives and libraries in Finland. Letters are a key data source in the study of biography, prosopography and history. Letter Sampo Finland (1809-1917) contains information on 1.2 million letters sent in the Grand Duchy of Finland and on 190,000 historical people related to them.

A hot research area in the future is the combination of semantic web ontologies, linked data knowledge graphs, large language models (LLM) and generative artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT, into a “Web of Wisdom” using neuro-symbolic AI methods. The Web of Wisdom can not only find and solve problems intelligently but also justify its answers (explainable AI). If a computer thinks the answer to the question about life, the universe and everything like that is “42”, as in Douglas Adams’s novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it would be nice to know the explanation for the answer as well.

More information:

Eero Hyvönen: How to Create a National Cross-domain Ontology and Linked Data Infrastructure and Use It on the Semantic Web. Semantic Web, 15(4):1499-1513, 2024. https://doi.org/10.3233/SW-243468 Eero Hyvönen: Digital Humanities on the Semantic Web: Sampo Model and Portal Series. Semantic Web,14( 4):729-744, 2023. https://research.aalto.fi/files/117572107/SCI_Hyv_nen_Semantic_Web_2023.pdf Eero Hyvönen: Serendipitous knowledge Discovery on the Web of Wisdom based on searching and explaining interesting relationships in knowledge graphs. Journal of Web Semantics, Elsevier, 2024. https://doi.or/10.1016/j.websem.2024.100852 SeCo research group website: https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/

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