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Minutes of Multilateralism: League of Nations and United Nations on the Semantic Web

Sampo-UI landing page for the League of Nations data

Project Overview

The “Minutes of Multilateralism” is an innovative digital humanities project, lead by the Centre for Digital Humanities and Multilateralism (CDHM), Geneva, Switzerland, designed to create an online platform where researchers, practitioners and the general public will engage with the minutes of the Geneva-based international organisations. By aggregating, interlinking and enriching data, the platform will foster research and provide insights into the role of International Geneva as a multilateral ecosystem. The “Minutes of Multilateralism” is an extension of a pilot project that will be launched early 2026 which will include the minutes of the Assembly of the League of Nations (1920-1939) and the General Assembly of the United Nations (1945-today).

The project will rely on a combination of: a) official minutes that are already digitised and made available online by international organisations; and b) public records that will be digitised by the CDHM (where the associated, source PDFs are housed on their original organisation-specific platforms). The latest Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software will be used on the existing PDF to extract the text and convert it into machine-readable data. This will allow the platform’s users to read, visualise and analyse a vast body of data, covering all the International Geneva fields of activities.

The minutes will be enriched with additional information, such as biographical information about the speakers, delegates and representatives. The platform will enable myriad research methodologies, such as prosopographical research, and will show how international issues were discussed in different settings, uncovering little known connections among the different stakeholders. The Minutes of Multilateralism platform will at the same time increase the visibility of Geneva-based international organisations’ archives, facilitate research and stimulate innovative academic inquiry.

The SeCo group's role in the project is to design and implement the user interface for the envisioned Minutes of Multilateralism publication portal platform based on the Sampo model, re-using the framework of ParliamentSampo - Parliament of Finland on the Semantic Web. The platform is based on two knowldge graphs: one representing the minutes and and the other one the speakers and the underlying organizational structures. The data comes from different international and Geneva-based archives and builds upon work of earlier projects and systems, such as LONSEA and Metagrid.ch. Our work has started in 2025 with the minutes of the Assembly of the League of Nations (1920-1939) and continues with the minutes of the General Assembly of the United Nations (1945-today). The minutes data are OCR'd and named entities recognized by Dr. Florian Cafiero and his research group at the Paris Sciences et Lettres University (PSL), Paris.

Acknowledgements

Contact Persons

• Dr. Petri Leskinen, Aalto University and Geneva Graduate School
• Prof. Eero Hyvönen, Aalto University