Invest in Finland

Finnish health information portal wins Semantic Web Challenge Award

06/11/2008

The idea behind HealthFinland is to create a single national entry-point for health information, health promotion and health-related news collected from diverse sources, which can be searched and browsed on an easy-to-use portal.

The information is compiled from different sources like expert organizations, governmental institutes and non-govermental organizations. A quality control process ensures that all information published through the portal is accessible, easy to understand, relevant to the topic, and factually correct.

The new portal will be available from February 2009. The work on creating and maintaining HealthFinland on a national level is coordinated by Finland’s National Public Health Institute. The system makes use of the national semantic web’s ONKI ontology library service that contains ontologies (including vocabularies and thesauri) used in Finnish on a national level, and services for creating, publishing, and using them cost-efficiently.

The HealthFinland concept was planned and the protype portal was produced by the Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo) at the Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) and the University of Helsinki, as part of the national FinnONTO research project that is funded by Tekes and a consortium of 38 companies and public organisations. The content for the award-winning prototype was produced by eight Finnish health sector organizations.

The Semantic Web Award was already the second time that the research group and the FinnONTO project have received recognition. In 2004 the MuseoSuomi portal received the same award, which has since then developed into the Kulttuurisampo system that aggregates different Finnish cultural content.

The Semantic Web Challenge Award is a respected application award of the symantic web research community. It aims to showcase the benefits of of the symantic web to society and promotes research towards ever more advanced applications.