History on the Semantic Web
Event Gazetteers and History Ontologies
Events are an essential component of cultural heritage (CH) Linked Data (LD): they link actors, places, times, objects, and other events into larger narrative structures, providing a rich basis for semantic searching, recommending, analysis, and visualization of CH data. For example, biographies, histories, photos, and paintings often reference or depict events. In this research line of SeCo, we develop shared vocabularies (gazetteers, ontologies) of events, such as the “Battle of Normandy” or “Crucifixion of Jesus”, and apply such representation in publishing and utilizing CH content on the Semantic Web. In our view, event gazetteers, a kind of semantic historical timelines, are a basis for developing and interlinking historical ontologies. Historical ontologies are necessary to 1) facilitate the aggregation and linking of heterogeneous content from various collections and 2) are very useful in developing "intelligent" applications of cultural heritage, such as semantic portals.
Semantic Timeline and History of Finland
Our work started in 2006 by developing a small timeline in RDF of Finnish history during the 19th century. This system was based on the Chronology of Finnish History developed by the Argicola community of Finnish historians. This system is included in the CultureSampo semantic portal that was published in 2008. Since then the timeline has been extented to cover the whole Argicola Chronology, and a new online demonstrator is under development.
Semantic Timeline and History of World War I
In 2011 we started working on war history, in particular history of World War I, in collaboration with Prof. Thea Lindquist of the University of Colorado, Boulder. A set of general requirements for an event gazetteer is being developed based on the needs of publishing, aggregating, and reusing cultural heritage content as Linked Data, as well as a metadata model addressing the presented requirements for representing historical events. The model is being applied in a case study aimed at developing an event ontology for World War I (WWI) with applications. Our goals from an end-user perspective are twofold: 1) Facilitate event-based cataloging for curators in memory organizations; 2) Utilize semantic event descriptions and narrative event structures in end-user applications for searching and linking documents and other content about WWI, and for structuring and visualizing them. (Cf. slides presented at the CIDOC 2012 conference).
Our work builds upon the legacy, results (ontologies, ontology services, tools, pilot applications), and established collaboration network of the FinnONTO project series 2003-2012.
Finnish World War II on the Semantic Web: WarSampo
The WarSampo project aims at publishing large heterogeneous sets of Linked Open Data related to the World War II in Finland. To demonstrate use cases of such data, the WarSampo semantic portal provides different perspectives to the wars. WarSampo is the next member in the "Sampo" series of our Linked Data based systems for Cultural Heritage and Digital Humanities, the others being CultureSampo, BookSampo, and TravelSampo .
Contact Persons
Prof. Eero Hyvönen, Aalto University
Dr. Eetu Mäkelä, Aalto University
Publications
2024
Eero Hyvönen: Military History on the Semantic Web: Lessons Learned from Developing Three In-use Linked Open Data Services and Semantic Portals for Digital Humanities. Intelligent Computing for Cultural Heritage: Global Developments and China´s Innovations, Francis & Taylor, Routledge, July, 2024. Book chapter. bib pdf link
2023
Eero Hyvönen, Petri Leskinen and Jouni Tuominen: LetterSampo – Historical Letters on the Semantic Web: A Framework and Its Application to Publishing and Using Epistolary Data of the Republic of Letters. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, vol. 16, no. 1, 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
Minna Tamper, Petri Leskinen, Eero Hyvönen, Risto Valjus and Kirsi Keravuori: Analyzing Biography Collection Historiographically as Linked Data: Case National Biography of Finland. Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability, Applicability, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 385-419, IOS Press, 2023. bib pdf link
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
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
Heikki Rantala, Eljas Oksanen and Eero Hyvönen: Harmonizing and Using Numismatic Linked Data in Digital Humanities Research and Application Development: Case DigiNUMA. The Semantic Web: ESWC 2022 Satellite Events, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 13384, pp. 26-30, Springer, July, 2022. bib pdf 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.
Petri Leskinen, Javier Ureña-Carrion, Petri Leskinen, Jouni Tuominen, Mikko Kivelä and Eero Hyvönen: Knowledge Graphs and Data Services for Studying Historical Epistolary Data in Network Science on the Semantic Web. May, 2022. Submitted for review. bib pdf
Heikki Rantala and Eero Hyvönen: Who is Related to What and How? Using Biographical Knowledge Graphs for Explainable Relational Search in BiographySampo. May, 2022. Submitted for review. bib pdf
Javier Ureña-Carrion, Petri Leskinen, Jouni Tuominen, Charles van den Heuvel, Eero Hyvönen and Mikko Kivelä: Communication Now and Then: Analyzing the Republic of Letters as a Communication Network. Applied Network Science, vol. 7, May, 2022. 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
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
Heikki Rantala, Ilkka Jokipii, Esko Ikkala and Eero Hyvönen: WarVictimSampo 1914–1922: a National War Memorial on the Semantic Web for Digital Humanities Research and Applications. ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, vol. 15, no. 1, ACM, Assoc. of Computing Machinery, February, 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
Eero Hyvönen, Petri Leskinen, Minna Tamper, Heikki Rantala, Esko Ikkala, Jouni Tuominen and Kirsi Keravuori: Linked Data – A Paradigm Shift for Publishing and Using Biography Collections on the Semantic Web. Proceedings of the Third Conference on Biographical Data in a Digital World (BD 2019), pp. 16-23, CEUR-WS Proceedings, vol. 3152, 2022. bib pdf link
2021
Minna Tamper, Eero Hyvönen and Petri Leskinen: Visualizing and Analyzing Networks of Named Entities in Biographical Dictionaries for Digital Humanities Research. Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing (CICling 2019), Springer-Verlag, October, 2021. Forth-coming. bib pdf
This paper shows how named entity extraction and networkanalysis can be used to examine biographies individually and in groupsto aid historians in biographical and prosopographical research. For this purpose a reference network of 13 100 biographies in the collections ofthe Biographical Centre of the Finnish Literature Society was created, based on links between the biographies as well as automatically extracted named entities found in the texts. The data was published in a SPARQL endpoint as a Linked Data knowledge graph on top of which network analytic tools were created and analysis were done showing the usefulness of the approach in Digital Humanities. The reference graph has been utilized for network analysis to examine egocentric networks of individual persons as well as networks among groups of people in prosopography. The data and tools presented are in use since autumn 2018 in the semantic portal BiographySampo that has had tens of thousands of users.
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
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, 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, 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
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
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.
Heikki Rantala, Eero Hyvönen and Esko Ikkala: Creating the HISTO Ontology of Finnish History Events. Data for History 2021: Modelling Time, Places, Agents, May, 2021. Abstract. bib pdf link
Eero Hyvönen, Petri Leskinen, Heikki Rantala, Esko Ikkala and Jouni Tuominen: Akatemiasampo-portaali ja -datapalvelu henkilöiden ja henkilöryhmien historialliseen tutkimukseen (AcademySampo Portal and Data Service for Biographical and Prosopographical Research). Informaatiotutkimus, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 28-56, May, 2021. bib pdf link
Eero Hyvönen: Löytösampo: kansalaisten arkeologiset löydöt semanttisessa webissä (FindSampo: Archaeological Finds on the Semantic Web). May, 2021. Järjestelmän lyhyt esittely. bib pdf
Babatunde Anafi: Representing and Using Temporal Linked Data in Semantic Cultural Heritage Portals. MSc Thesis (in English), University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, March, 2021. bib link
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.
Heikki Rantala and Eero Hyvönen: Knowledge-based Approach to Relational Search in Knowledge Graphs with Explanations: Case BiographySampo – Biographies on the Semantic. 2021. Submitted for evaluation. 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
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
Pejam Hassanzadeh, Eero Hyvönen, Esko Ikkala, Jouni Tuominen, Suzie Thomas, Anna Wessman and Ville Rohiola: FindSampo Platform for Reporting and Studying Archaeological Finds Using Citizen Science. 3rd Workshop on Humanities in the Semantic Web (WHiSe 2020), pp. 33-40, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 2695, June, 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
Howard Hotson and Eero Hyvönen: Topics. Reassembling the Republic of Letters in the Digital Age (H. Hotson and T. Wallnig (eds.)), pp. 137-148, Göttingen University Press, 2019. bib link
Howard Hotson, Thomas Wallnig, Jouni Tuominen, Eetu Mäkelä, and Eero Hyvönen: People. Reassembling the Republic of Letters in the Digital Age (H. Hotson and T. Wallnig (eds.)), pp. 119-136, Göttingen University Press, 2019. bib link
Eero Hyvönen, Ruth Ahnert, Sebastian E. Ahnert, Jouni Tuominen, Eetu Mäkelä, Miranda Lewis and Gertjan Filarski: Reconciling metadata. Reassembling the Republic of Letters in the Digital Age (H. Hotson and T. Wallnig (eds.)), pp. 223-235, Göttingen University Press, 2019. bib link
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.
Eero Hyvönen, Petri Leskinen, Minna Tamper, Heikki Rantala, Esko Ikkala, Jouni Tuominen and Kirsi Keravuori: BiographySampo - Publishing and Enriching Biographies on the Semantic Web for Digital Humanities Research. The Semantic Web. ESWC 2019 (Pascal Hitzler, Miriam Fernández, Krzysztof Janowicz, Amrapali Zaveri, Alasdair J.G. Gray, Vanessa Lopez, Armin Haller and Karl Hammar (eds.)), pp. 574-589, Springer-Verlag, June, 2019. bib pdf link
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.
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.
Petri Leskinen and Eero Hyvönen: Extracting Genealogical Networks of Linked Data from Biographical Texts. The Semantic Web: ESWC 2019 Satellite Events (Hitzler, P., Kirrane, S., Hartig, O., de Boer, V., Vidal, M.-E., Maleshkova, M., Schlobach, S., Hammar, K., Lasierra, N., Stadtmüller, S., Hose, K., Verborgh, R. (ed.)), pp. 121-125, Springer, June, 2019. bib pdf
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
Eero Hyvönen, Petri Leskinen, Minna Tamper, Heikki Rantala, Esko Ikkala, Jouni Tuominen and Kirsi Keravuori: Demonstrating BiographySampo in Solving Digital Humanities Research Problems in Biography and Prosopography. The Fourth Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 2019 (DHN2019), Book of Abstracts, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark, March, 2019. bib pdf link
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 and Heikki Rantala: Knowledge-based Relation Discovery in Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graphs. DHN 2019 Digital Humanities in Nordic Countries. Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 4th Conference, pp. 230-239, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol-2364, Copenhagen, Denmark, March, 2019. bib pdf link
Eero Hyvönen: Historiallinen paikkatieto semanttisessa webissä: Biografiasampo. Positio, no. 1, Maanmittauslaitos, February, 2019. bib pdf
2018
Toby Burrows, Eero Hyvönen, Lynn Ransom, Hanno Wijsman: Mapping Manuscript Migrations. Digging into Data for the History and Provenance of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts. Manuscript Studies. A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 249-252, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. bib link
Eero Hyvönen, Petri Leskinen, Minna Tamper, Heikki Rantala, Esko Ikkala, Jouni Tuominen and Kirsi Keravuori: Biografiasammon tekoäly yhdistää ja rikastaa suomalaiset elämäkerrat semanttisessa webissä. Aalto-yliopisto, Semanttisen laskennan tutkimusryhmä (SeCo), Nov, 2018. bib pdf
Biografiasampo-järjestelmä käynnistää uuden aikakauden elämäkertakokoelmien julkaisemisessa ja käyttämisessä verkossa. Järjestelmän ydinaineistona on Kansallisbiografia ja muut Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran (SKS) ja tieteellisten seurojen toimittamat pienoiselämäkerrat, yhteensä 13 100 elämäntarinaa, joita on kirjoittanut 900 suomalaista tutkijaa. Biografiasammon innovaationa on luoda kieliteknologian, tekoälyn ja semanttisen webin teknologioiden avulla elämäkertojen teksteistä ja niihin eri lähteissä liittyvistä tiedoista tietämysverkko (knowledge graph) ja kansallinen tietoinfrastruktuuri, joka koostuu miljoonista tietojen välisistä yhteyksistä. Tietämysverkko on julkaistu linkitetyn datan palvelussa, jonka varaan on toteutettu seitsemästä sovellusnäkymästä koostuva älykäs, kaikille avoin ja maksuton verkkopalvelu biografiasampo.fi kansalaisten ja digitaalisten ihmistieteiden tutkijoiden käytettäväksi.
Eero Hyvönen, Petri Leskinen, Minna Tamper, Jouni Tuominen and Kirsi Keravuori: Semantic National Biography of Finland. Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 3rd Conference (DHN 2018), pp. 372-385, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Vol-2084, Helsinki, Finland, March, 2018. bib pdf link
This paper presents the vision of publishing and utilizing textual biographies as Linked (Open) Data on the Semantic Web. As a case study, we publish the live stories of the National Biography of Finland, created by the Finnish Literature Society, as semantic, i.e., machine “understandable” metadata in a SPARQL endpoint using the Linked Data Finland (LDF.fi) service. On top of the data service various Digital Humanities applications are built. The applications include searching and studying individual personal histories as well as historical research of groups of persons using methods of prosopography. The biographical data is enriched by extracting events from unstructured and semi-structured texts, and by linking entities internally and to external data sources. A faceted semantic search engine is provided for filtering groups of people from the data for prosopographical research. An extension of the event-based CIDOC CRM ontology is used as the underlying data model, where lives are seen as chains of interlinked events populated from the data of the biographies and additional data sources, such as museum collections, library databases, and archives.
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.
2014
Esko Ikkala, Eetu Mäkelä and Eero Hyvönen: TourRDF: Representing, Enriching, and Publishing Curated Tours Based on Linked Data. 19th International Conference of Knowledge Engineering and Management (EKAW 2014), Demo and Poster Papers, November, 2014. bib pdf
Current mobile tourist guide systems are developed and used in separate data silos: each system and vendor tends to use its own proprietary, closed formats for representing tours and point of interest (POI) content. As a result, tour data cannot be enriched from other providers’ tour and POI repositories, or from other external data sources — even when such data were publicly available by, e.g., cities willing to promote tourism. This paper argues, that an open shared RDF-based tour vocabulary is needed to address these problems, and introduces such a model, TourRDF, extending the earlier TourML schema into the era of Linked Data. As a test and an evaluation of the approach, a case study based on data about the Unesco World Heritage site Suomenlinna fortress is presented.
Eero Hyvönen, Miika Alonen, Esko Ikkala and Eetu Mäkelä: Life Stories as Event-based Linked Data: Case Semantic National Biography. Proceedings of ISWC 2014 Posters & Demonstrations Track, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, October, 2014. bib pdf link
This paper argues, by presenting a case study and a demonstration on the web, that biographies make a promising application case of Linked Data: the reading experience can be enhanced by enriching the biographies with additional life time events, by proving the user with a spatio-temporal context for reading, and by linking the text to additional contents in related datasets.
2013
Thea Lindquist, Michael Dulock, Juha Törnroos, Eero Hyvönen and Eetu Mäkelä: Using Linked Open Data to Enhance Subject Access in Online Primary Sources. Cataloging & Classifying Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 8, Francis & Taylor, 2013. bib link
Using online primary sources is both rewarding and challenging for users. Improving subject access is essential as these sources become increasingly important in educational curricula. A user needs assessment with humanities users showed improving findability and context for historical subjects were major needs. Linked Data can help by linking related concepts in the sources using specialized vocabularies, enriching them with outside resources, and enabling semantic services that empower users. This article discusses a project to enhance subject access in an online World War I collection by deep linking historical data on the civilian experience in occupied Belgium and France.
2007
Eero Hyvönen, Olli Alm and Heini Kuittinen: Using an Ontology of Historical Events in Semantic Portals for Cultural Heritage. Proceedings of the Cultural Heritage on the Semantic Web Workshop at the 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007), Busan, Korea, November 12, 2007. bib pdf
We argue that an ontology of historical events is needed in semantic portals for cultural heritage due to three reasons. First, ontological identifiers (URIs) of events, such as the World War II or coronation of Napoleon, are needed in order to make collection metadata mutually interoperable in terms of related events---in the vein as identifiers are needed for identifying artifact types, persons, and geolocations when annotating collection items. Second, events are of central importance in creating semantic links between cultural contents in applications such as recommendation systems. Third, historical events are important as content items of their own, forming the backbone of chronological histories.
