Esko Ikkala

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.

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.

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.

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.

This paper presents a series of projects where one of the main sources for toponomastic research in Finland, the corpora of place names in the Names Archive database of the Institute for the Languages of Finland, was digitized and how the resulting database was converted, enriched and published as Linked Open Data using a data processing pipeline. Utilizing the Linked Data infrastructure and various external data sources, a modern full-stack web application, NameSampo, was created in collaboration between toponomastic researchers and computer scientists for searching, analyzing, and visualizing digital toponomastic data sources.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Historiallinen paikkatieto on keskeisessä asemassa muistiorganisaatioiden kokoelmien hallinnassa ja hyödyntämisessä sekä digitaalisten ihmistieteiden tutkimuksessa. Paikkatiedon käsitteleminen muissa kuin erikoistuneissa paikkatietojärjestelmissä sekä paikkatiedon ajallinen ulottuvuus tuovat mukanaan lukuisia haasteita, joihin linkitetyn datan teknologiat ovat tarjonneet lupaavia ratkaisuja. Tässä työssä esitellään kulttuurialan organisaatioiden tarpeeseen kehitetty uusi linkitetyn datan teknologioihin perustuva historiallisten paikkojen ja karttojen palvelumalli, HIPLA. HIPLA-palvelumallin tavoitteena on tarjota yhteinen näkymä eri organisaatioiden hallinnoimaan paikkatietoon ja mahdollistaa hajautettujen paikkatietoaineistojen yhteisöllinen täydentäminen, haku ja selailu sekä nykyisillä että historiallisilla kartoilla. Lisäksi työssä toteutettiin HIPLA-palvelumallin etuja havainnollistava prototyyppisovellus Hipla.fi, jota pilotoitiin osana talvi- ja jatkosodan aineistoja linkitettynä avoimena datana julkaisevaa Sotasampo-projektia. Pilotoinnin tuloksena syntyi talvi- ja jatkosodan paikkaontologia, joka tarjoaa työkalun sotiin liittyvien aineistojen automaattiselle linkitykselle ja aineistojen maantieteelliselle visualisoimiselle.

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.

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.

This paper presents a new Linked Open Data brokering service model HIPLA for using and maintaining historical place gazetteers and maps based on distributed SPARQL endpoints. The model introduces several novelties: First, the service facilitates collaborative maintenance of geo-ontologies and maps in real time as a side effect of annotating contents in legacy cataloging systems. The idea is to support a collaborative ecosystem of curators that creates and maintains data about historical places and maps in a sustainable way. Second, in order to foster understanding of historical places, the places can be provided on both modern and historical maps, and with additional contextual Linked Data attached. Third, since data about historical places is typically maintained by different authorities and in different countries, the service can be used and extended in a federated fashion, by including new distributed SPARQL endpoints (or other web services with a suitable API) into the system. To test and demonstrate the model, we created the first prototype implementation Hipla.fi of the HIPLA model. Hipla.fi is based on four Finnish datasets in SPARQL endpoints totaling some 840,000 geocoded places on 450 historical maps from two atlas series aligned on modern maps, and on the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) SPARQL endpoint in the US. As a first application, a part of the Hipla.fi data service has been applied in creating a 5 million triple semantic portal of historical Second World War data with tens of thousands of end users.

This paper introduces the idea of applying crowdsourcing to evolving ontology services; the goal is to facilitate collaborative maintenance of ontologies in real time as a side effect of annotating contents in legacy cataloging systems. The idea is being implemented in the use case of creating and managing a national level gazetteer of historical places in Finland.

This paper initiates and fosters work on publishing Linked Open Data about the Second World War. It is argued that the heterogeneous, distributed data about the international world war history makes a promising use case for semantic technologies. We hope that by making war data openly available we can learn from the past and promote peace.

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.

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.