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Mikko Koho

Staff Scientist, D.Sc. (Tech.)

phone:+358504316071
email: firstname.lastname@aalto.fi
room: 3171 @ Department of Computer Science, Maarintie 8, Espoo
postal address: Department of Computer Science, P.O. Box 15400, FI-00076 Aalto, Finland


Mikko Koho is a Staff Scientist at Aalto University, Department of Computer Science. His research focuses on applying Semantic Web technologies to integrate and harmonize heterogeneous, distributed datasets as Linked Open Data, while also developing methods and tools for analyzing, visualizing, and exploring the data. His focus is on multidisciplinary Digital Humanities research, collaborating with many cultural heritage organizations and humanities researchers. His research has received several international awards. He received his D.Sc. (Tech.) at Aalto University in 2020, with a dissertation titled "Representing, Using, and Maintaining Military Historical Linked Data on the Semantic Web" relating to the popular and internationally awarded WarSampo project.

He has since also worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Department of Digital Humanities and part-time with the University of Pennsylvania as a technical consultant.

Areas of interest include:

  • Knowledge Graphs, Semantic Web, Linked Open Data
  • Digital Humanities
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Data Interoperability
  • Ontologies
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Data Science
  • Biodiversity Informatics

I have been involved in the following projects:

Publications

2024

Eero Hyvönen, Mikko Koho, Angel Daza and Gregor Pobežin: Editorial of the Proceedings of the BD2022 Biographical Data in a Digital World 2022 Conference. Proceedings of the Biographical Data in a Digital World 2022 (BD 2022), Tokyo, Institute of Cultural History, ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia, January, 2024. bib pdf link
Mikko Koho and Eero Hyvönen: Studying Occupations and Social Measures of Perished Soldiers in WarSampo Linked Open Data. Proceedings of the Biographical Data in a Digital World 2022 (BD 2022), Tokyo, Institute of Cultural History, ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia, January, 2024. bib pdf link
Eero Hyvönen, Mikko Koho, Angel Daza and Gregor Pobežin (eds.): BD2022 Proceedings of the BD2022 Biographical Data in a Digital World 2022 Conference. Institute of Cultural History, ZRC SAZUs, Ljubljana, January, 2024. bib link

2023

Senka Drobac, Johanna Enqvist, Petri Leskinen, Muhammad Faiz Wahjoe, Heikki Rantala, Mikko Koho, Ilona Pikkanen, Iida Jauhiainen, Jouni Tuominen, Hanna-Leena Paloposki, Matti La Mela and Eero Hyvönen: The Laborious Cleaning: Acquiring and Transforming 19th-Century Epistolary Metadata. Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publication, DHNB2023 Conference Proceeding, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 248-262, University of Oslo Library, Norway, 2023. bib pdf link
Mikko Koho, L. P. Coladangelo, Lynn Ramson and Doug Emery: Wikibase Model for Premodern Manuscript Metadata Harmonization, Linked Data Integration, and Discovery. ACM Journal of Computing and Cultural Heritage, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 1-25, 2023. bib pdf link
Mikko Koho and Eero Hyvönen: Studying Occupations and Social Measures of Perished Soldiers in WarSampo Linked Open Data. Biographical Data in a Digital World 2022 (BD 2022), Tokyo, CEUR Workshop Sproceedings, August, 2023. bib pdf

2022

Toby Burrows, Laura Cleaver, Doug Emery, Eero Hyvönen, Mikko Koho, Lynn Ransom, Emma Thomson and Hanno Wijsman: Medieval manuscripts and their migrations: Using SPARQL to investigate the research potential of an aggregated Knowledge Graph. Digital Medievalist, vol. 15, 2022. bib pdf link
Joonas Kesäniemi, Mikko Koho, Esko Ikkala and Eero Hyvönen: Using Wikibase for Managing Cultural Heritage Linked Open Data Based on CIDOC CRM. New Trends in Database and Information Systems, pp. 542-549, Springer International Publishing, August, 2022. bib pdf link
Mikko Koho, L. P. Coladangelo, Lynn Ransom and Doug Emery: A Wikibase Model for Premodern Manuscript Metadata Harmonization, Linked Data Integration, and Discovery. August, 2022. Submitted. bib
Eero Hyvönen, Minna Tamper, Esko Ikkala, Mikko Koho, Rafael Leal, Joonas Kesäniemi, Arttu Oksanen, Jouni Tuominen and Aki Hietanen: LawSampo Portal and Data Service for Publishing and Using Legislation and Case Law as Linked Open Data on the Semantic Web. AI4LEGAL-KGSUM 2022: Artificial Intelligence Technologies for Legal Documents and Knowledge Graph Summarization 2022, vol. 3257, pp. 41-50, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, August, 2022. bib pdf link
Eero Hyvönen, Esko Ikkala, Mikko Koho, and Rafael Leal, Heikki Rantala and Minna Tamper: How to Search and Contextualize Scenes inside Videos for Enriched Watching Experience: Case Stories of the Second World War Veterans. The Semantic Web: ESWC 2022 Satellite Events, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 13384, pp. 163-167, Springer, July, 2022. bib pdf link
Angel Daza, Antske Fokkens, Richard Hadden, Eero Hyvönen, Mikko Koho and Eveline Wandl-Vogt: Biographical Data in a Digital World 2022 (BD 2022) Workshop. Digital Humanities 2022, Conference Abstracts, July 25-29, 2022 Online, Tokyo. Japan, University of Tokyo, pp. 39-42, ADHO, July, 2022. bib link
Eero Hyvönen, Laura Sinikallio, Petri Leskinen, Matti La Mela, Jouni Tuominen, Kimmo Elo, Senka Drobac, Mikko Koho, Esko Ikkala, Minna Tamper, Rafael Leal and Joonas Kesäniemi: Linked Data Approach for Studying Parliamentary Speeches and Networks of Politicians in Finland 1907-2021 (long paper). Digital Humanities 2022, Conference Abstracts, July 25-29, 2022 Online, Tokyo. Japan, University of Tokyo, pp. 254-257, ADHO, July, 2022. bib link
Mikko Koho, Esko Ikkala and Eero Hyvönen: Reassembling the Lives of Finnish Prisoners of the Second World War on the Semantic Web. Proceedings of the Third Conference on Biographical Data in a Digital World (BD 2019), pp. 31-39, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, June, 2022. bib pdf link
This paper presents first results of a new, ninth application perspective for the semantic portal WarSampo - Finnish WW2 on the Semantic Web, based on a database of ca. 4450 Finnish prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. Our key idea is to reassemble the life of each prisoner of war by using Linked Data, based on information about the person in different data sources. Using the enriched aggregated data, a biographical global home page for each prisoner of war can be created, that is more complete than information in individual data sources. The application perspective is targeted to researchers of military history, to study and analyze the data in order to form new research questions or hypotheses, as well as to public in the large looking for information e.g., about their relatives that were captured as prisoners of war. Employing the faceted search of the application perspective, prosopographical research on subgroups of prisoners is possible.
Eero Hyvönen, Laura Sinikallio, Petri Leskinen, Matti La Mela, Jouni Tuominen, Kimmo Elo, Senka Drobac, Mikko Koho, Esko Ikkala, Minna Tamper, Rafael Leal and Joonas Kesäniemi: Finnish Parliament on the Semantic Web: Using ParliamentSampo Data Service and Semantic Portal for Studying Political Culture and Language. Digital Parliamentary data in Action (DiPaDA 2022), Workshop at the 6th Digital Humanities in Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference, long paper, pp. 69-85, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 3133, May, 2022. bib pdf link
Mikko Koho, Rafael Leal, Esko Ikkala, Minna Tamper, Heikki Rantala and Eero Hyvönen: Building Lightweight Ontologies for Faceted Search with Named Entity Recognition: Case WarMemoirSampo. Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Knowledge Graph Generation From Text and the 1st International Workshop on Modular Knowledge co-located with 19th Extended Semantic Conference (ESWC 2022) (Sanju Tiwari, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya, Francesco Osborne, Dimitris Kontokostas, Jennifer D’Souza and Mayank Kejriwal (eds.)), vol. 3184, pp. 19-35, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, May, 2022. International Knowledge Graph Generation From Text (TEXT2KG). bib pdf link
Mikko Koho, Heikki Rantala and Eero Hyvönen: Digital Humanities and Military History: Analyzing Casualties of the WarSampo Knowledge Graph. DHNB 2022 The 6th Digital Humanities in Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference (Karl Berglund, Matti La Mela and Inge Zwart (eds.)), vol. 3232, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Uppsala, Sweden, March, 2022. bib pdf link
Joonas Kesäniemi, Mikko Koho, Esko Ikkala and Eero Hyvönen: Using Wikibase for Managing Cultural Heritage Linked Open Data Based on CIDOC CRM. 6th Digital Humanities in Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference, poster paper, pp. 74-75, March, 2022. Book of Abstracts. bib link
Heikki Rantala, Esko Ikkala, Jouni Tuominen, Eero Hyvönen, Ville Rohiola, Eljas Oksanen and Mikko Koho: FindSampo: A Linked Data Based Service for Analyzing and Disseminating Archaeological Finds. 6th Digital Humanities in Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference, poster paper, book of abstracts, pp. 118-119, March, 2022. bib link
Rafael Leal, Heikki Rantala, Mikko Koho, Esko Ikkala, Markus Merenmies and Eero Hyvönen: WarMemoirSampo: A Semantic Portal for War Veteran Interview Videos. DHNB 2022 The 6th Digital Humanities in Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, long papers, Vol. 3232, March, 2022. bib pdf link
Jouni Tuominen, Mikko Koho, Ilona Pikkanen, Senka Drobac, Johanna Enqvist, Eero Hyvönen, Matti La Mela, Petri Leskinen, Hanna-Leena Paloposki and Heikki Rantala: Constellations of Correspondence: a Linked Data Service and Portal for Studying Large and Small Networks of Epistolary Exchange in the Grand Duchy of Finland. DHNB 2022 The 6th Digital Humanities in Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference, pp. 415-423, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 3232, March, 2022. bib pdf link
Toby Burrows, Laura Cleaver, Doug Emery, Mikko Koho, Lynn Ransom and Emma Thomson: Exploring a large graph of historical objects: the Mapping Manuscript Migrations knowledge graph. February, 2022. Graphs and Networks in the Humanities 2022 conference, extended abstract. bib pdf
Esko Ikkala, Eero Hyvönen, Heikki Rantala and Mikko Koho: Sampo-UI: A Full Stack JavaScript Framework for Developing Semantic Portal User Interfaces. Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability, Applicability, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 69-84, January, 2022. Online version published in 2021, print version in 2022. bib pdf link
Heikki Rantala, Esko Ikkala, Ville Rohiola, Mikko Koho, Jouni Tuominen, Eljas Oksanen, Anna Wessman and Eero Hyvönen: FindSampo: A Linked Data Based Portal and Data Service for Analyzing and Disseminating Archaeological Object Finds. The Semantic Web: ESWC 2022, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 13261, pp. 478-494, Springer, 2022. bib pdf link

2021

Eero Hyvönen, Esko Ikkala, Mikko Koho, Jouni Tuominen, Toby Burrows, Lynn Ransom and Hanno Wijsman: Mapping Manuscript Migrations on the Semantic Web: A Semantic Portal and Linked Open Data Service for Premodern Manuscript Research. The Semantic Web - ISWC 2021, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 12922, pp. 615-630, Springer, 2021. bib pdf link
Rafael Leal, Joonas Kesäniemi, Mikko Koho and Eero Hyvönen: Relevance Feedback Search Based on Automatic Annotation and Classification of Texts. 3rd Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2021) (Dagmar Gromann, Gilles Sérasset, Thierry Declerck, John P. McCrae, Jorge Gracia, Julia Bosque-Gil, Fernando Bobillo and Barbara Heinisch (eds.)), Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), vol. 93, pp. 18:1-18:15, Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, 2021. bib pdf link
Eero Hyvönen, Laura Sinikallio, Petri Leskinen, Senka Drobac, Jouni Tuominen, Kimmo Elo, Matti La Mela, Mikko Koho, Esko Ikkala, Minna Tamper, Rafael Leal and Joonas Kesäniemi: Parlamenttisampo: eduskunnan aineistojen linkitetyn avoimen datan palvelu ja sen käyttömahdollisuudet. Informaatiotutkimus, vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 216-244, November, 2021. bib pdf link
Heikki Rantala, Esko Ikkala, Mikko Koho, Jouni Tuominen, Ville Rohiola and Eero Hyvönen: Using FindSampo Linked Open Data Service and Portal for Spatio-temporal Data Analysis of Archaeological Finds in Digital Humanities. ISWC-Posters-Demos-Industry 2021 International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2021: Posters, Demos, and Industry Tracks, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Oct, 2021. bib pdf link
Eero Hyvönen, Heikki Rantala, Esko Ikkala, Mikko Koho, Jouni Tuominen, Babatunde Anafi, Suzie Thomas, Anna Wessman, Eljas Oksanen, Ville Rohiola, Jutta Kuitunen and Minna Ryyppö: Citizen Science Archaeological Finds on the Semantic Web: The FindSampo Framework. Antiquity, A Review of World Archaeology, vol. 95, no. 382, pp. e24, Cambridge University Press, August, 2021. bib pdf link
Laura Sinikallio, Senka Drobac, Minna Tamper, Rafael Leal, Mikko Koho, Jouni Tuominen, Matti La Mela and Eero Hyvönen: Plenary Debates of the Parliament of Finland as Linked Open Data and in Parla-CLARIN Markup. 3rd Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge, LDK 2021, Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), vol. 93, pp. 8:1-8:17, Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik GmbH, Zaragoza, Spain, August, 2021. bib pdf link
Toby Burrows, Doug Emery, Arthur Mitchell Fraas, Eero Hyvönen, Esko Ikkala, Mikko Koho, David Lewis, Andrew Morrison, Kevin Page, Lynn Ransom, Emma Cawfield Thomson, Jouni Tuominen, Athanasios Velios and Hanno Wijsman: A New Model for Manuscript Provenance Research: The Mapping Manuscripts Migrations Project. Manuscript Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 131-144, The University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, US, July, 2021. bib pdf link
Toby Burrows, Laura Cleaver, Doug Emery, Mikko Koho, Lynn Ransom and Emma Thomson: Using SPARQL to investigate the research potential of an aggregated Linked Open Data dataset for the Mapping Manuscript Migrations project. July, 2021. Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) conference 2021 abstract. bib
Toby Burrows, Laura Cleaver, Doug Emery, Mikko Koho, Lynn Ransom and Emma Thomson: Using SPARQL to investigate the research potential of an aggregated Linked Open Data dataset: the Mapping Manuscript Migrations project. DH Benelux 2021 abstract, June, 2021. bib pdf link
Toby Burrows, Mikko Koho, Jouni Tuominen, Eero Hyvönen, Kevin Page, David Lewis, Doug Emery, Hanno Wijsman, Lynn Ransom and Emma Cawlfield Thomson: Modelling the History of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts for the Mapping Manuscript Migrations Portal. Data for History 2021: Modelling Time, Places, Agents, June, 2021. Abstract. bib link
Mikko Koho, Toby Burrows, Eero Hyvönen, Esko Ikkala, Kevin Page, Lynn Ransom, Jouni Tuominen, Doug Emery, Mitch Fraas, Benjamin Heller, David Lewis, Andrew Morrison, Guillaume Porte, Emma Thomson, Athanasios Velios and Hanno Wijsman: Harmonizing and Publishing Heterogeneous Pre-Modern Manuscript Metadata as Linked Open Data. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), vol. 73, no. 2, pp. 240-257, May, 2021. bib pdf link
Manuscripts are a crucial form of evidence for research into all aspects of premodern European history and culture, and there are numerous databases devoted to describing them in detail. This descriptive information, however, is typically available only in separate data silos based on incompatible data models and user interfaces. As a result, it has been difficult to study manuscripts comprehensively across these various platforms. To address this challenge, a team of manuscript scholars and computer scientists worked to create “Mapping Manuscript Migrations” (MMM), a semantic portal, and a Linked Open Data service. MMM stands as a successful proof of concept for integrating distinct manuscript datasets into a shared platform for research and discovery with the potential for future expansion. This paper will discuss the major products of the MMM project: a unified data model, a repeatable data transformation pipeline, a Linked Open Data knowledge graph, and a Semantic Web portal. It will also examine the crucial importance of an iterative process of multidisciplinary collaboration embedded throughout the project, enabling humanities researchers to shape the development of a digital platform and tools, while also enabling the same researchers to ask more sophisticated and comprehensive research questions of the aggregated data.
Mikko Koho, Esko Ikkala, Petri Leskinen, Minna Tamper, Jouni Tuominen and Eero Hyvönen: WarSampo Knowledge Graph: Finland in the Second World War as Linked Open Data. Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability, Applicability, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 265-278, January, 2021. bib pdf link
The Second World War (WW2) is arguably the most devastating catastrophe of human history, a topic of great interest to not only researchers but the general public. However, data about the Second World War is heterogeneous and distributed in various organizations and countries making it hard to utilize. In order to create aggregated global views of the war, a shared ontology and data infrastructure is needed to harmonize information in various data silos. This makes it possible to share data between publishers and application developers, to support data analysis in Digital Humanities research, and to develop data-driven intelligent applications. As a first step towards these goals, this article presents the WarSampo knowledge graph (KG), a shared semantic infrastructure, and a Linked Open Data (LOD) service for publishing data about WW2, with a focus on Finnish military history. The shared semantic infrastructure is based on the idea of representing war as a spatio-temporal sequence of events that soldiers, military units, and other actors participate in. The used metadata schema is an extension of CIDOC CRM, supplemented by various military historical domain ontologies. With an infrastructure containing shared ontologies, maintaining the interlinked data brings upon new challenges, as one change in an ontology can propagate across several datasets that use it. To support sustainability, a repeatable automatic data transformation and linking pipeline has been created for rebuilding the whole WarSampo KG from the individual source datasets. The WarSampo KG is hosted on a data service based on W3C Semantic Web standards and best practices, including content negotiation, SPARQL API, download, automatic documentation, and other services supporting the reuse of the data. The WarSampo KG, a part of the international LOD Cloud and totalling ca. 14 million triples, is in use in nine end-user application views of the WarSampo portal, which has had over 400 000 end users since its opening in 2015.
Toby Burrows, Mitch Fraas, Eero Hyvönen, Esko Ikkala, Mikko Koho, David Lewis, Andrew Morrison, Kevin Page, Lynn Ransom, Emma Thomson, Jouni Tuominen, Athanasios Velios and Hanno Wijsman: Linking Data to Explore the History of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts: the Mapping Manuscript Migrations Project. Book of abstracts: 2nd International Conference of the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH), Krasnoyarsk, Russia, 21 - 25 September 2021, 2021. bib pdf

2020

Heikki Rantala, Esko Ikkala, Ilkka Jokipii, Mikko Koho, Jouni Tuominen and Eero Hyvönen: WarVictimSampo 1914–1922: A Semantic Portal and Linked Data Service for Digital Humanities Research on War History. The Semantic Web: ESWC 2020 Satellite Events (Harth, Andreas, Presutti, Valentina, Troncy, Raphaël, Acosta, Maribel, Polleres, Axel, Fernández, Javier D., Xavier Parreira, Josiane, Hartig, Olaf, Hose, Katja and Cochez, Michael (eds.)), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 12124, pp. 191-196, Springer-Verlag, 2020. bib pdf link
Babatunde Anafi, Mikko Koho and Eero Hyvönen: Temporal Visualization and Data Analysis of Archaeological Finds: Case FindSampo. Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technologies (CHNT 25), Museum Stadt Archäologie Wien, Nov, 2020. Posters. bib pdf
Mikko Koho, Petri Leskinen and Eero Hyvönen: Integrating Historical Person Registers as Linked Open Data in the WarSampo Knowledge Graph. Semantic Systems. In the Era of Knowledge Graphs. SEMANTiCS 2020 (Eva Blomqvist, Paul Groth, Victor de Boer, Tassilo Pellegrini, Mehwish Alam, Tobias Käfer, Peter Kieseberg, Sabrina Kirrane, Albert Meroño-Peñuela and Harshvardhan J. Pandit (eds.)), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 12378, pp. 118-126, Springer, Cham, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October, 2020. bib pdf link
Semantic data integration from heterogeneous, distributed data silos enables Digital Humanities research and application development employing a larger, mutually enriched and interlinked knowledge graph. However, data integration is challenging, involving aligning the data models and reconciling the concepts and named entities, such as persons and places. This paper presents a record linkage process to reconcile person references in different military historical person registers with structured metadata. The information about persons is aggregated into a single knowledge graph. The process was applied to reconcile three person registers of the popular semantic portal WarSampo -- Finnish World War 2 on the Semantic Web . The registers contain detailed information about some 100,000 people and are individually maintained by domain experts. Thus, the integration process needs to be automatic and adaptable to changes in the registers. An evaluation of the record linkage results is promising and provides some insight into military person register reconciliation in general.
Toby Burrows, Antoine Brix, Douglas Emery, Arthur Mitchell Fraas, Eero Hyvönen, Esko Ikkala, Mikko Koho, David Lewis, Synnove Myking, Kevin Page, Lynn Ransom, Emma Cawlfield Thomson, Jouni Tuominen, Hanno Wijsman and Pip Wilcox: Linked Open Data Vocabularies and Identifiers for Medieval Studies. DHN 2020 Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries. Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 5th Conference, pp. 211-218, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 2612, Riga, Latvia, October, 2020. bib pdf link
Heikki Rantala, Ilkka Jokipii, Mikko Koho, Esko Ikkala, Jouni Tuominen and Eero Hyvönen: Building a Linked Open Data Portal of War Victims in Finland 1914-1922. DHN 2020 Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries. Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 5th Conference, pp. 310-317, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 2612, Riga, Latvia, October, 2020. bib pdf link
Toby Burrows, Douglas Emery, Mitch Fraas, Eero Hyvönen, Esko Ikkala, Mikko Koho, David Lewis, Andrew Morrison, Kevin Page, Lynn Ransom, Emma Thomson, Jouni Tuominen, Athanasios Velios and Hanno Wijsman: Mapping Manuscript Migrations: Digging into Data for Researching the History and Provenance of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts: White Paper. August, 2020. bib pdf link
Toby Burrows, Douglas Emery, Arthur Mitchell Fraas, Eero Hyvönen, Esko Ikkala, Mikko Koho, David Lewis, Andrew Morrison, Kevin Page, Lynn Ransom, Emma Cawlfield Thomson, Jouni Tuominen, Athanasios Velios, and Hanno Wijsman: Mapping Manuscript Migrations Knowledge Graph: Data for Tracing the History and Provenance of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts. Journal of Open Humanities Data, vol. 6, pp. 3, June, 2020. bib pdf link
Mikko Koho: Representing, Using, and Maintaining Military Historical Linked Data on the Semantic Web. Dissertation, Aalto University, School of Science, Department of Computer Science, May, 2020. bib pdf link

2019

Suzie Thomas, Anna Wessman, Esko Ikkala, Jouni Tuominen, Mikko Koho and Eero Hyvönen: (co-)Creating a Sustainable Platform for Finland’s Archaeological Chance Finds: The Story of SuALT. Digital Heritage and Archaeology in Practice (Ethan Watrall and Lynne Goldstein (eds.)), University Press of Florida, December, 2019. Accepted. bib pdf
Mikko Koho, Erkki Heino, Petri Leskinen, Esko Ikkala, Minna Tamper, Kasper Apajalahti, Jouni Tuominen, Eetu Mäkelä and Eero Hyvönen: WarSampo Knowledge Graph. Zenodo, October, 2019. Dataset. bib link
WarSampo Knowledge Graph includes harmonized data of different kinds concerning the Second World War in Finland, separated in different subgraphs representing events, actors, places, photographs, and other aspects and documentation of the war. The data covers the Winter War 1939-1940 against the Soviet attack, the Continuation War 1941-1944 where the occupied areas of the Winter War were temporarily regained, and the Lapland War 1944-1945, where the Finns pushed the German troops away from Lapland.
Anna Wessman, Suzie Thomas, Ville Rohiola, Mikko Koho, Esko Ikkala, Jouni Tuominen, Eero Hyvönen, Jutta Kuitunen, Helinä Parviainen, and Marianna Niukkanen: Citizen Science in Archaeology: Developing a Collaborative Web Service for Archaeological Finds in Finland. Transforming Heritage Practice in the 21st Century: Contributions from Community Archaeology (John Jameson and Sergiu Musteață (eds.)), pp. 337-352, Springer, July, 2019. bib pdf link
Agata Dominowska, Elsi Hyttinen, Peter Ivanics, Mikko Koho, Ilona Pikkanen and Risto Turunen: Hiding in Plain Sight: Poetry in Newspapers and How to Approach it. Human IT: Journal for Information Technology Studies as a Human Science, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 145-171, University of Borås, July, 2019. bib link
Lia Gasbarra, Mikko Koho, Ilkka Jokipii, Heikki Rantala and Eero Hyvönen: An Ontology of Finnish Historical Occupations. The Semantic Web: ESWC 2019 Satellite Events (Hitzler, Pascal, Kirrane, Sabrina, Hartig, Olaf, de Boer, Victor, Vidal, Maria-Esther, Maleshkova, Maria, Schlobach, Stefan, Hammar, Karl, Lasierra, Nelia, Stadtmüller, Steffen, Hose, Katja and Verborgh, Ruben (eds.)), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 64-68, Springer, Cham, Portoroz, Slovenia, June, 2019. bib pdf link
Historical datasets often impose the need to study groups of people based on occupation or social status. This paper presents first results in creating an ontology of historical Finnish occupations, AMMO, that enables selection of groups of people based on their occupation, occupational groups, or socioeconomic class. AMMO is linked to the international historical occupation classification HISCO and to a modern Finnish occupational classification for interoperability. AMMO will be used as a component in two semantic portals for Finnish war history.
Mikko Koho, Lia Gasbarra, Jouni Tuominen, Heikki Rantala, Ilkka Jokipii and Eero Hyvönen: AMMO Ontology of Finnish Historical Occupations. Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Open Data and Ontologies for Cultural Heritage (ODOCH 19) (Antonella Poggi (ed.)), vol. 2375, pp. 91-96, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Rome, Italy, June, 2019. bib pdf link
This paper introduces AMMO Ontology of Finnish Historical Occupations. AMMO is based on thousands of occupation labels extracted from three Finnish military historical datasets of the early 20th century: the first consists of the ca. 40 000 war-related death records around the time of the Finnish Civil War (1914–1922); the second consists of the ca. 95 000 death records of Finnish soldiers in the Winter War and Continuation War (1939–1944); the third contains the ca. 4500 records of Finnish prisoners of war in the Soviet Union during the WW2. Our goal from a Digital Humanities perspective is to use AMMO to study military history and these datasets based on the occupation and social status of the soldiers. AMMO will also be used as a component for faceted search and semantic recommendation in two semantic portals for Finnish military history. AMMO is aligned with the international historical occupation classification HISCO and with a modern Finnish occupational classification for international and national interoperability. The ontology is published as Linked Open Data in an ontology service.
Anna Wessman, Suzie Thomas, Ville Rohiola, Jutta Kuitunen, Esko Ikkala, Jouni Tuominen, Mikko Koho and Eero Hyvönen: A Citizen Science Approach to Archaeology: Finnish Archaeological Finds Recording Linked Open Database (SuALT). DHN 2019 Digital Humanities in Nordic Countries. Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 4th Conference, pp. 469-478, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol-2364, Copenhagen, Denmark, March, 2019. bib pdf link
Eero Hyvönen, Esko Ikkala, Jouni Tuominen, Mikko Koho, Toby Burrows, Lynn Ransom and Hanno Wijsman: A Linked Open Data Service and Portal for Pre-modern Manuscript Research. DHN 2019 Digital Humanities in Nordic Countries. Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 4th Conference, pp. 220-229, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol-2364, Copenhagen, Denmark, March, 2019. bib pdf link

2018

Petri Leskinen, Goki Miyakita, Mikko Koho and Eero Hyvönen: Combining Faceted Search with Data-analytic Visualizations on Top of a SPARQL Endpoint. Proceedings of VOILA 2018, Monterey, California. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol. 2187, October, 2018. bib pdf
Mikko Koho, Esko Ikkala, Erkki Heino and Eero Hyvönen: Maintaining a Linked Data Cloud and Data Service for Second World War History. Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection. 7th International Conference, EuroMed 2018, Nicosia, Cyprus, vol. 11196, Springer-Verlag, October-November, 2018. bib pdf link
Mikko Koho, Esko Ikkala and Eero Hyvönen: How to Maintain a Linked Data Cloud in a Deployed Semantic Portal. Proceedings of the ISWC 2018 Posters & Demonstrations, Industry and Blue Sky Ideas Tracks, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Monterey, California, USA, October, 2018. Vol 2180. bib pdf link
Mikko Koho, Erkki Heino, Arttu Oksanen and Eero Hyvönen: Toffee - Semantic Media Search Using Topic Modeling and Relevance Feedback. Proceedings of the ISWC 2018 Posters & Demonstrations, Industry and Blue Sky Ideas Tracks, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Monterey, California, USA, October, 2018. Vol 2180. bib pdf link
Suzie Thomas, Anna Wessman, Jouni Tuominen, Mikko Koho, Esko Ikkala, Eero Hyvönen, Ville Rohiola and Ulla Salmela: SuALT: Collaborative Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Finds and Public Engagement through Linked Open Data. Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 3rd Conference (DHN 2018), Book of Abstracts, Helsinki, Finland, March, 2018. bib pdf
Mikko Koho, Erkki Heino, Esko Ikkala, Eero Hyvönen, Reijo Nikkilä, Tiia Moilanen, Katri Miettinen and Pertti Suominen: Integrating Prisoners of War Dataset into the WarSampo Linked Data Infrastructure. Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 3rd Conference (DHN 2018), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Helsinki, Finland, March, 2018. Vol 2084. bib pdf link
One of the great promises of Linked Data and the Semantic Web standards is to provide a shared data infrastructure into which more and more data can be imported and aligned, forming a sustainable, ever growing knowledge graph or linked data cloud, Web of Data. This paper studies and evaluates this idea in the context of the WarSampo Linked Data cloud, providing an infrastructure for data related to the Second World War in Finland. As a case study, a new database of prisoners of war with related contents is transformed into linked data and integrated into WarSampo. Lessons learned are discussed in relation to using traditional data publishing approaches.

2017

Mikko Koho, Eero Hyvönen, Erkki Heino, Jouni Tuominen, Petri Leskinen and Eetu Mäkelä: Linked Death - Representing, Publishing, and Using Second World War Death Records as Linked Open Data. The Semantic Web: ESWC 2017 Satellite Events (Eva Blomqvist, Katja Hose, Heiko Paulheim, Agnieszka Ławrynowicz, Fabio Ciravegna and Olaf Hartig (eds.)), pp. 369-383, Springer, Cham, 2017. bib pdf link
War history of the Second World War (WW2), humankind’s largest disaster, is of great interest to both laymen and researchers. Most of us have ancestors and relatives who participated in the war, and in the worst case got killed. Researchers are eager to find out what actually happened then, and even more importantly why, so that future wars could perhaps be prevented. The darkest data of war history are casualty records—from such data we could perhaps learn most about the war. This paper presents a model and system for representing death records as linked data, so that 1) citizens could find out more easily what happened to their relatives during WW2 and 2) digital humanities (DH) researchers could (re)use the data easily for research.
Petri Leskinen, Mikko Koho, Erkki Heino, Minna Tamper, Esko Ikkala, Jouni Tuominen, Eetu Mäkelä and Eero Hyvönen: Modeling and Using an Actor Ontology of Second World War Military Units and Personnel. Proceedings of the 16th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2017) (Claudia d Amato, Miriam Fernandez, Valentina Tamma, Freddy Lecue, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux, Juan Sequeda, Christoph Lange and Jeff Heflin (eds.)), pp. 280-296, Springer-Verlag, Vienna, Austria, October, 2017. bib pdf link
This paper presents a model for representing historical military personnel and army units, based on large datasets about World War II in Finland. The model is in use in WarSampo data service and semantic portal, which has had tens of thousands of distinct visitors. A key challenge is how to represent ontological changes, since the ranks and units of military personnel, as well as the names and structures of army units change rapidly in wars. This leads to serious problems in both search as well as data linking due to ambiguity and homonymy of names. In our solution, actors are represented in terms of the events they participated in, which facilitates disambiguation of personnel and units in different spatio-temporal contexts. The linked data in the WarSampo Linked Open Data cloud and service has ca. 9 million triples, including actor datasets of ca. 100 000 soldiers and ca. 16 100 army units. To test the model in practice, an application for semantic search and recommending based on data linking was created, where the spatio-temporal life stories of individual soldiers can be reassembled dynamically by linking data from different datasets. An evaluation is presented showing promising results in terms of linking precision.
Esko Ikkala, Mikko Koho, Erkki Heino, Petri Leskinen, Eero Hyvönen and Tomi Ahoranta: Prosopographical Views to Finnish WW2 Casualties Through Cemeteries and Linked Open Data. Proceedings of the Workshop on Humanities in the Semantic Web (WHiSe II), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vienna, Austria, October, 2017. bib pdf link
This paper presents an application for studying the death records of WW2 casualties from a prosopograhical perspective, provided by the various local military cemeteries where the dead were buried. The idea is to provide the end user with a global visual map view on the places in which the casualties were buried as well as with a local historical perspective on what happened to the casualties that lay within a particular cemetery of a village or town. Plenty of data exists about the Second World War (WW2), but the data is typically archived in unconnected, isolated silos in different organizations. This makes it difficult to track down, visualize, and study information that is contained within multiple distinct datasets. In our work, this problem is solved using aggregated Linked Open Data provided by the WarSampo Data Service and SPARQL endpoint.
Mikko Koho, Agata Dominowska, Elsi Hyttinen, Péter Ivanics, Elizabeth Oakes, Ilona Pikkanen, Leena Tulkki and Risto J. Turunen: Big data approach to 19th-century Finnish newspaper literature. HELDIG Digital Humanities Summit 2017, Helsinki, Finland, October, 2017. bib pdf link
Eero Hyvönen, Erkki Heino, Petri Leskinen, Esko Ikkala, Mikko Koho, Minna Tamper, Jouni Tuominen and Eetu Mäkelä: WarSampo: Publishing and Using Linked Open Data about the Second World War. EuropeanaTech Insight, no. 7, Europeana, September, 2017. bib pdf link
The article overviews the system WarSampo – Finnish World War 2 on the Semantic Web, the winner of the LODLAM Challenge 2017 Open Data Prize on June 29 in Venice, Italy.
Minna Tamper, Petri Leskinen, Esko Ikkala, Arttu Oksanen, Eetu Mäkelä, Erkki Heino, Jouni Tuominen, Mikko Koho and Eero Hyvönen: AATOS – a Configurable Tool for Automatic Annotation. Proceedings, Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2017), pp. 276-289, Springer-Verlag, Galway, Ireland, June, 2017. bib pdf link
This paper presents an automatic annotation tool AATOS for providing documents with semantic annotations. The tool links entities found from the texts to ontologies defined by the user. The application is highly configurable and can be used with different natural language Finnish texts. The application was developed as a part of WarSampo and Semantic Finlex projects and tested using Kansa Taisteli magazine articles and consolidated Finnish legislation of Semantic Finlex. The quality of the automatic annotation was evaluated by measuring precision and recall against existing manual annotations. The results showed that the quality of the input text, as well as the selection and configuration of the ontologies impacted the results.
Erkki Heino, Minna Tamper, Eetu Mäkelä, Petri Leskinen, Esko Ikkala, Jouni Tuominen, Mikko Koho and Eero Hyvönen: Named Entity Linking in a Complex Domain: Case Second World War History. Proceedings, Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2017), pp. 120-133, Springer-Verlag, Galway, Ireland, June, 2017. bib pdf link
This paper discusses the challenges of applying named entity linking in a rich, complex domain – specifically, the linking of 1) military units, 2) places and 3) people in the context of rich Second World War data. Multiple sub-scenarios are discussed in detail through concrete evaluations, analyzing the problems faced, and the solutions developed. A key contribution of this work is to highlight the heterogeneity of problems and approaches needed even inside a single domain, depending on both the source data as well as the target authority.

2016

Eero Hyvönen, Erkki Heino, Petri Leskinen, Esko Ikkala, Mikko Koho, Minna Tamper, Jouni Tuominen and Eetu Mäkelä: Publishing Second World War History as Linked Data Events on the Semantic Web. Proceedings of Digital Humanities 2016, short papers, pp. 571-573, Kraków, Poland, July, 2016. bib pdf link
Data about wars is typically heterogeneous, distributed in the data silos of the fighting parties, multilingual, and often controversial depending on the political point of view. It is therefore hard for the historians to get a global picture of what has actually happened, to whom, where, when, and how. We argue that Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies are a very promising approach for modeling, harmonizing, and aggregating data about war history. Our goal is to make it possible, for both historians and laymen, to study history in a contextualized way where linked datasets enrich each other. The paper presents the in-use WarSampo 1 system, where massive collections of heterogeneous data about the (Finnish) history of the Second World War are harmonized using an event-based approach, and provided as a Linked Open Data service for applications to use. As a use case, a semantic portal WarSampo providing six different perspectives to the war based on events is presented.
Eero Hyvönen, Erkki Heino, Petri Leskinen, Esko Ikkala, Mikko Koho, Minna Tamper, Jouni Tuominen and Eetu Mäkelä: WarSampo Data Service and Semantic Portal for Publishing Linked Open Data about the Second World War History. The Semantic Web – Latest Advances and New Domains (ESWC 2016) (Harald Sack, Eva Blomqvist, Mathieu d Aquin, Chiara Ghidini, Simone Paolo Ponzetto and Christoph Lange (eds.)), pp. 758-773, Springer-Verlag, May, 2016. bib pdf link
This paper presents the WarSampo system for publishing collections of heterogeneous, distributed data about the Second World War on the Semantic Web. WarSampo is based on harmonizing massive datasets using event-based modeling, which makes it possible to enrich datasets semantically with each others’ contents. WarSampo has two components: First, a Linked Open Data (LOD) service WarSampo Data for Digital Humanities (DH) research and for creating applications related to war history. Second, a semanticWarSampo Portal has been created to test and demonstrate the usability of the data service. The WarSampo Portal allows both historians and laymen to study war history and destinies of their family members in the war from different interlinked perspectives. Published in November 2015, theWarSampo Portal had some 20,000 distinct visitors during the first three days, showing that the public has a great interest in this kind of applications.
Mikko Koho, Eero Hyvönen, Erkki Heino, Jouni Tuominen, Petri Leskinen and Eetu Mäkelä: Linked Death - Representing, Publishing, and Using Second World War Death Records as Linked Open Data. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Humanities in the Semantic Web (WHiSe), CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, May, 2016. Vol 1608. bib pdf link
War history of the Second World War (WW2), humankind s largest disaster, is of great interest to both laymen and researchers. Most of us have ancestors and relatives who participated in the war, and in the worst case got killed. Researchers are eager to find out what actually happened then, and even more importantly why, so that future wars could perhaps be prevented. The darkest data of war history are casualty records---from such data we could perhaps learn most about the war. This paper presents a model and system for representing death records as linked data, so that 1) citizens could find out more easily what happened to their relatives during WW2 and 2) digital humanities (DH) researchers could (re)use the data easily for research.
Mikko Koho, Erkki Heino and Eero Hyvönen: SPARQL Faceter - Client-side Faceted Search Based on SPARQL. Joint Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Linked Media and the 3rd Developers Hackshop, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, May, 2016. Vol 1615. bib pdf link
The faceted search paradigm is widely used in web applications, and there are various tools available for implementing it on the server side. In contrast, this paper presents an HTML based component tool on the client side that can be plugged on virtually any public SPARQL endpoint on the web, using only SPARQL API for data retrieval. To test and demonstrate the idea and the tool, application of the tool in a large in-use semantic portal is presented.

2015

Mikko Koho: Linked Data -palvelu luontohavaintoaineistoille. MSc Thesis (in Finnish), University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, February, 2015. bib pdf link
Biologisten havaintoaineistojen julkaiseminen linkitettynä datana mahdollistaa useiden aineistojen yhdistämisen toisiinsa. Yhdistämällä toisiinsa useita samaan asiaan liittyviä aineistoja, voidaan saavuttaa parempi ymmärrys kiinnostuksen kohteena olevasta ilmiöstä kuin tutkimalla aineistoja erikseen. Näin voidaan mahdollistaa tarkempien päätelmien tekeminen aineistojen pohjalta sekä etsiä odotettuja tai odottamattomia yhteyksiä aineistojen välillä. Linkitetyssä datassa käytetty RDF-tietomalli tuo aineistoihin koneluettavuuden ja helpon tavan viitata kaikkiin aineistojen osiin. Linkitettynä datana julkaistuja aineistoja voidaan helposti rikastaa yhä uusilla aineistoilla. Tässä tutkielmassa käsitellään Hangon lintuaseman havaintoaineiston sekä Ilmatieteenlaitoksen Hangon Russarön säähavaintoaineiston mallinnusta, käsittelyä ja hyödyntämistä linkitettynä datana. Aineistot on mallinnettu käyttäen RDF Data Cube -sanastoa, joka parantaa aineistojen yhteentoimivuutta. Lintuhavaintoaineistoon on annotoitu lajitietoa käyttäen ontologiaa Suomen linnuista, jota on rikastettu mm. lajien tuntomerkkiontologialla sekä uhanalaisuustiedoilla. Aineistot on julkaistu Linked Data Finland -alustalla, ja aineistojen välisten yhteyksien hahmottamiseksi on kehitetty visualisointipalvelun prototyyppi. Säätilan tiedetään olevan tärkeimpiä päivittäisen lintumuuton voimakkuuteen vaikuttavia tekijöitä. Visualisointipalvelulla pyritään näyttämään käyttäjälle, miten säätila vaikuttaa lintuhavaintomääriin ja erityisesti havaittuun lintumuuttoon. Aineistojen välisten suhteiden parempi tuntemus mahdollistaa tarkempien päätelmien tekemisen lintuhavaintoaineiston perusteella. Tutkielmassa esitetyt menetelmät ovat yleistettävissä lintu- ja säähavaintoaineistojen lisäksi muihin rakenteeltaan samankaltaisiin aineistoihin.

2014

Mikko Koho, Eero Hyvönen and Aleksi Lehikoinen: Ornithology Based on Linking Bird Observations with Weather Data. The Semantic Web: ESWC 2014 Satellite Events, vol. 8798, pp. 75-85, Springer, May, 2014. bib pdf link
This paper presents first results of a use case of Linked Data for eScience, where 0.5 million rows of bird migration observations over 30 years time span are linked with 0.1 million rows of related weather observations and a bird species ontology. Using the enriched linked data biology researchers at the Finnish Museum of Natural History will be able to investigate temporal changes in bird biodiversity and how weather conditions affect bird migration. To support data exploration, the data is published in a SPARQL endpoint service using the RDF Data Cube model, on which semantic search and visualization tools are built.

2013

Jouni Tuominen, Nina Laurenne, Mikko Koho and Eero Hyvönen: The Birds of the World Ontology AVIO. The Semantic Web: ESWC 2013 Satellite Events, pp. 300-301, Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, Montpellier, France, May 26-30, 2013. bib pdf
We present an ontology for managing the scientific and common names of birds. The ontology is based on the TaxMeOn meta-ontology model for biological names. The ontology is in use as an ontology service and it has been applied in a bird watching system.
Eero Hyvönen, Miika Alonen, Mikko Koho and Jouni Tuominen: BirdWatch--Supporting Citizen Scientists for Better Linked Data Quality for Biodiversity Management. Proceedings of the first international Workshop on Semantics for Biodiversity (S4BioDiv), ESWC 2013, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol 979, Montpellier, France, May, 2013. bib pdf link
Observational data about species of public interest, such as birds and butterflies, is often created and collected by volunteered citizen scientists, and used by professionals for managing biodiversity. The education and skills of the citizens participating in the work varies a lot, and the process of making observations is typically not systematic but rather ad hoc. As a result, the quality of the observational data in repositories, such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility GBIF Data Portal, is often not good, hampering its utilization severely. This paper presents an approach for enhancing data quality in a citizen science setting, and presents a mobile tool BirdWatch for citizen observers, mitigating difficulties in producing high quality Linked Data for biodiversity management.

2010

Nina Laurenne, Jouni Tuominen, Mikko Koho and Eero Hyvönen: Modeling and Publishing Biological Names and Classifications on the Semantic Web. TDWG 2010 Annual Conference of the Taxonomic Databases Working Group, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA, September, 2010. Poster abstract. bib pdf
Nina Laurenne, Jouni Tuominen, Mikko Koho and Eero Hyvönen: Taxon Meta-Ontology TaxMeOn - Towards an Ontology Model for Managing Changing Scientific Names in Time. TDWG 2010 Annual Conference of the Taxonomic Databases Working Group, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA, September, 2010. Contributed abstract. bib pdf

(total: 76 publications)

Events and presentations

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