About ONKI
This application (the ONKI SKOS Browser) is part of the prototype of an ontology service by Semantic Computing Research Group of the Aalto University School of Science and Technology and the University of Helsinki. The prototype is a part of the National Semantic Web Ontology Project in Finland (FinnONTO) and Semantic Web 2.0 (FinnONTO 2.0). More information about the ONKI concept can be found on the ONKI project site.
The ONKI Service supports the content indexers, information searchers and ontology developers by providing user interfaces for using ontologies. The browser for thesaurus-like ontologies is the ONKI SKOS Browser. With ONKI SKOS Browser ontological concepts and their relations can be browsed via concept hierarchy, alphabetical index and the links between concepts. Concepts can be searched with text search, which main feature is the semantic autocompletion.
The ONKI Service also provides application interfaces which can be used to add ontological functionalities to semantic web and legacy applications. This way a traditional indexing system can utilize the concept URIs, and the information in the system is made interoperable with semantic web. At the moment ONKI Service provides AJAX and SOAP interfaces. See the AJAX-based ONKI Selector widget in action by trying the annotation functionalities of the ONKI Service!
ONKI API
The AJAX/SOAP interface has the following methods:
- search(label, lang, maxHits, typeUri, parentUri) : Returns concepts matching the query parameters
- getLabel(uri, lang) : Returns the label of the given concept URI
- getAvailableLanguages() : Returns the language codes of languages used in the labels of concepts in the ontology
- getAvailableTypeUris() : Returns the type URIs of the concepts in the ontology
See the Web Service demonstration page for the WSDL file and examples on how to use the API.
A more general REST interface (a refined SKOS API) will be implemented in the future.