Title: Linked Open Ontology cloud: managing a system of interlinked cross-domain lightweight ontologies

Authors: Matias Frosterus; Jouni Tuominen; Sini Pessala; Eero Hyvönen

Addresses: Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo), Aalto University, PO Box 15500, 00076 Aalto, Finland ' Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo), Aalto University, PO Box 15500, 00076 Aalto, Finland ' Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo), Aalto University, PO Box 15500, 00076 Aalto, Finland ' Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo), Aalto University, PO Box 15500, 00076 Aalto, Finland

Abstract: Traditionally, the structure of the controlled vocabularies used for annotation can be utilised for reasoning for information retrieval. However, this can be problematic when applied in the Linked Data context. Linked Data typically comes from different organisations and domains with mutually incompatible vocabularies without explicit links between them resulting in data silos. This paper argues that to solve the problem one has to transform the annotation vocabularies into a Linked Open Ontology cloud. We present a method for transforming a set of legacy thesauri into a cloud of interlinked ontologies while ensuring the validity of the transitive subclass relations and the means for maintaining the system when component ontologies are updated. Our approach has been used and evaluated in practice building a cloud called KOKO of 16 ontologies, with a total of 47,000 concepts. KOKO has been published as an ontology service and is in use in various organisations for both data indexing and semantic search.

Keywords: lightweight ontologies; linked open ontology cloud; ontology change propagation; SKOS; ontologisation; cross-domain interoperability; cloud computing; information retrieval; legacy thesauri; data indexing; semantic search.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMSO.2015.073879

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, 2015 Vol.10 No.3, pp.189 - 201

Received: 02 Mar 2015
Accepted: 25 Oct 2015
Published online: 27 Dec 2015 *

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