The Finnish Society for Computer Sciences has awarded Jouni Tuominen, MSc, the 2009-2010 Master’s thesis award for his thesis ‘Helppokytkentäiset ontologiapalvelut semanttisessa webissä’ (easy-to-connect ontology services in the semantic web) that he completed at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki. At the same time, Petri Savoilainen (TKK) received honourable mention for his work ‘Applications of combinatorial algorithms in statistical physics,' as did Matti Tornio (Aalto University) for his work ‘Natural gradient for variational bayesian learning.’

Jouni Tuominen’s work relates to the ontology service concept developed in the national FinnONTO project. Ontologies are concept models encompassing the concepts of a topic. The ontologies describe the relations between concepts in a format understood by machines.

The focus of the work was on analysing how both people and machines can utilise services for the use of glossaries and ontologies through a centralised national web service.

In connection with this work, the national ONKI ontology library service (http://onki.fi) has been developed to enable the categorisation of contents in a unified way. ‘You can categorise anything with ONKI!’ says an excited Tuominen. ‘The service contains thousands of concepts, such as heavy metal, cats, and preservation. New concepts are added all the time,’ he says.

The ONKI service is open and free. It has thousands of users both in public administration and private companies.

Jouni Tuominen’s work kept an exceptionally high standard. The work included nine high-grade international publications written for the Semantic Computing group, a project shared by the Department of Media Technology at Aalto University and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki. Tuominen’s own contribution to this work has been significant. His work has been supervised by Professor Eero Hyvönen (Aalto and UH) and Miro Lehtonen, PhD, (UH).

The prize was awarded at the Computer Science fair in Espoo on 30-31 May 2011. The Master’s thesis award was first given in 1984. It has previously been given to such personages as Linus Torvalds and Tatu Ylönen.