WarVictimSampo 1914–1922: A Semantic Portal and Linked Data Service for Digital Humanities Research on War History

Abstract

This paper presents the semantic portal and Linked Open Data (LOD) service WarVictimSampo 1914–22 about the war victims, battles, and prisoner camps in the Finnish Civil and other wars. The system is based on a database of the National Archives of Finland and related data compiled during the project. The system contains detailed information about some 40 000 deaths extracted from several data sources, and data about prisoner camps and over 1000 battles of the Civil War. A key novelty of WarVictimSampo 1914–22 is the integration of ready-to-use Digital Humanities tooling with the data service, which allows, e.g., studying information about wider prosopographical groups in addition to individual victims. We demonstrate how the tools of the portal, as well as the underlying SPARQL endpoint, can be used to explore and analyze war history in flexible and visual ways. WarVictimSampo 1914–22 is a new member in the series of “Sampo” model based semantic portals. It was published in late 2019 and got 20 000 users in two weeks.