YSO-places is a bilingual (Finnish, Swedish) ontology of places (geographic gazetteer), intended for general use. YSO places includes concepts referring to administrative and other areas as well as physical geography selected to meet the content description needs of GLAM institutions in particular. The concepts refer to current and historical places in and outside Finland. For places outside Finland mainly countries and cities are included. Other places are authorized if the concepts are need repetitively in content description.

YSO places has a hierarchical structure based on part-whole relations (iso-thes:broaderPartitive) between concepts. For Finnish places the hierarchical relations rely on the structure of the Place Name Register of the National Land Survey of Finland. In addition to part-whole relations, concepts are linked by associative relations (skos:hasRelated).

Places located in Finland are linked to the Place Name Register of the National Land Survey of Finland to enable users to search for locations and other information. Finnish places are classified in accordance with the Place Name Register. The place types and their identifiers are listed here.  Some of the places are linked to Wikidata. 

The forms of names for concepts have been verified from authorised sources and are based on Finnish spelling rules. Additionally, about one half of the concepts have labels in English which are mainly based on Wikidata.

The concepts of YSO places are based originally on the geographical concets in the General Finnsh Thesaurus (YSA) and its Swedish language complement (Allärs).  There is a skos:exactMatch relationship with concepts in these thesauri. 

Adding new concepts

New term or change proposals can be done with forms accessed at the ontology pages in the finto.fi service.  The forms are available both in Finnish and Swedish.   Changes to the ontology are listed on: YSO-paikkojen muutokset (in Finnish) and Ändringar i ALLFO-orter (in Swedish).

Namespace

The persistant identifiers of the YSO places concepts use the same namespace as the General Finnish Ontology YSO: http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/

The browsing is done on a separate graph at: http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/places

Development rules

For geographical conepts are considered such as

• continents, countries and states

• regions (e.g. Middle East, Cap of the North, Baltic region)

  • Parts of countries based on cardinal points and country names are not authorized (e.g. East-Estonia, Northern France), unless they are part of the official administrative areas in that country. Exceptions are made if the name is clearly established and often needed on content description.
• historic places (e.g. Austria-Hungary,Byzantine Empire, Old Finland)
• administrative regions, cities and towns, municipalities, villages, roads
• landforms such as seas, lakes, rivers, mountains and hills
• bays and fjards of lakes, only larges ones are formed as concepts (usually the lake is enough)
• traffic areas (e.g. a harbour)

For any matching names qualifiers are added in parenthesis after the name to make the preferred labels unique. A qualifier is usually the broader concept, sometimes added with the type of place.

Some additional and more specific rules are described on the Finnish page.