FINTO: the Finnish Thesaurus and Ontology service

In the past few years, the National Library of Finland has been developing its subject authorities towards a more easily reusable linked data format. Old string-based monolingual thesauri have been transformed into multilingual machine readable indexing “ontologies”, and a new linked data vocabulary service called Finto has been set up for the dissemination of the new type of vocabularies. A culmination point in this development was reached in the summer of 2019, when the production of subject authorities was permanently moved away from the library databases into a completely linked data based environment. In the process all old bibliographic records with subject indexing in the Finnish Libraries’ Union Catalog were converted to host the new form of concepts.