Publishing and Using Ontologies as Mash-Up Services

The Semantic Web is based on using ontologies for enabling semantically disambiguated data exchange between distributed systems on the web. This requires ecient means for publishing ontologies on the web to ensure the availability, sharing and acceptance of the ontolo- gies. Support services are needed for utilizing ontologies easily and cost- eectively in applications and legacy systems lacking ontology support. To address these vital needs, this paper presents the ONKI ontology service which provides ready-to-use \mash-up" functionalities, such as semantic disambiguation, concept nding and concept fetching as ready- to-use web widgets for adding ontology support to e.g. HTML forms using JavaScript. Two implementations of the ONKI Server are pre- sented: ONKI-SKOS for ontologies presented in the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) language and ONKI-Geo for geographical ontologies with a map interface. The presented ONKI systems are oper- ational on the web, used in the National Finnish Ontology Service. They have been successfully used in several pilot applications.