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The Linked Data Finland service platform won the challenge series for science and research, as well as data processing in the Apps4Finland competition.

Professor Eero Hyvönen at the award ceremony. Photo: Antti Kokkola

The victory in the Science and Research Series was based on the result of a public vote and the evaluation of a panel of experts from the Open Science and Research project. The victorious Linked data Finland project has initiated and promoted the utilisation of resources for research information, and has developed ground-breaking semantic networking technologies. The project has focused on the automated production of semantic information, with mashup publication as ready-to-use web services, as well as the production of new context-sensitive applications.

Linked Data Finland also won the Data Processing Series.  The basis for the award was the ability of the winning project to combine data sets from different sources. Linked Data Finland offers end-users a wide range of services, as well as open interfaces for service developers. Digital cultural heritage related applications were also regarded as important.

About the Linked Data Finland service platform

The Linked Data Finland platform aims to promote the open interoperable publication of datasets and the ability to exploit them for a variety of applications. It is based on the latest semantic W3C (the coordinating body for World Wide Web infrastructure) web standards and practices, which enables intelligent searching via content and structure.

Dozens of data sets have been published on the platform, such as Finnish legislation from the Ministry of Justice, the Finnish Wikipedia based DBpedia, the library web service Kirjasampo, a semantic version of the Kalevala, museum collections, over a million bird spotting observations on Tiira.fi, Linked Open Aalto etc. In addition to this, numerous applications have been developed for these data sets. The Kirjasampo web service for example has had over 60 000 visitors a month. The platform has also been applied to research cooperation in the international Digital Humanities project between Stanford, Oxford and Colorado universities.

Aalto University has been involved in the research work along with the University of Helsinki's Department of Computer Science. The platform development has been funded by Tekes, the Finnish Cultural Foundation and a consortium of twenty or so Finnish public organisations and private companies.

Additional information:

Professor Eero Hyvönen
eero.hyvonen@aalto.fi
Tel. +358(0)50 3841618
Semantic Computing Research Group
Department of Media Technology
Aalto University School of Science
Research group web pages: http://www.seco.tkk.fi

See also news for January 24, 2014