Finnish General Upper Ontology - YSO/ALLSO

The Finnish General Upper Ontology YSO is intended to be the main ontology in Finland, interlinking domain and instance ontologies. It is based on the widely used YSA (Finnish General Thesaurus) maintained by the National Library of Finland. The Finnish General Upper Ontology has been created in the FinnONTO project by the Semantic Computing Research Group with the support of project partners, especially the National Library of Finland. The ontology is based on Finnish concepts and has been built by adding a top ontology and arranging the concepts of the YSA according to hierarchy of the top ontology. The ontology includes subclass-of relations, associative relations and as a new concept type, which is not included in the thesaurus, part-of relations. The existing subclass-of relations have been roughly checked and new relations added when necessary. Since the original thesaurus includes ambiguous words, in many cases new concepts have been added in order to disambiguate the different senses of the words. The Finnish General Upper Ontology can be used for describing different types of resources. Because of coherent hierarchy, the ontology enables creation of accurate and consistent content descriptions. In addition to the information included in YSA, English equivalents have been added and the Swedish equivalents which are based on the Allärs thesaurus have been checked using the hierarchy of the ontology.