Building a linked open data portal of war victims in Finland 1914–1922

Abstract

This paper presents results from a project that publishes data about the war victims in Finland in 1914–22 as a Linked Open Data service and a portal of tools called WARVICTIMSAMPO 1914–22 to explore and analyze the data. At the same time, the data is extended with new information and cleaned from mistakes when found. The project is based on the database War Victims of Finland 1914–22 (“Sotasurmat 1914–22”) of the National Archives of Finland and related data compiled during the project. This database contains some 40000 death records, most of which are due to the Finnish Civil War but some are related to the First World War and the Kindred Nations Wars. In addition to the war victims, our data includes information about 1200 battles of the Civil War and various prisoner camps. 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 show by examples how using the tools of the portal the data can be better explored and analyzed for research and education purposes.