Business Ontology combined with the Finnish Ontology for Public Administration Services

The Finnish Ontology for Public Administration Services in the Finto service of the National Library

The Finnish Terminology Centre commenced in September 2020 an ontology project in which the concepts of the Business Ontology were combined to the Finnish Ontology for Public Administration Services. On the same occasion, the General Finnish Ontology on which the Finnish Ontology for Public Administration Services is built, was updated to its newest frozen version (2021.3.Epikuros). These ontology works were completed in summer 2021. The Finnish Ontology for Public Administration Services now has more than 5800 concepts. The ontology contains information in Finnish, Swedish and English, but this project only focused on the information in Finnish.

The updated Finnish Ontology for Public Administration Services was published on the Finto service of the Finnish National Library in the beginning of August 2021. At the same time, the Business Ontology was removed from the Finto service as a separate data base. However, the permanent identifiers of Business Ontology concepts refer to concepts that replace them in the Finnish Ontology for Public Administration Services and the General Finnish Ontology.

The Finnish Ontology for Public Administration Services is a specialised ontology managed by the Digital and Population Data Services Agency. The ontology promotes semantically consistent description of services in different online services and makes services more easily discovered. It also facilitates use and production of data related to services in information networks. The Finnish Ontology for Public Administration Services is being used, for example, in the description of the information in Palvelutietovaranto (engl. Service Information Pool) behind the Suomi.fi online service.