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International Semantic Web Conference

ISWC 2021: The Semantic Web – ISWC 2021 pp 714–730Cite as

Reconciling and Using Historical Person Registers as Linked Open Data in the AcademySampo Portal and Data Service

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNISA,volume 12922)

Abstract

This paper presents a method for extracting and reassembling a genealogical network automatically from a biographical register of historical people. The method is applied to a dataset of short textual biographies about all 28 000 Finnish and Swedish academic people educated in 1640–1899 in Finland. The aim is to connect and disambiguate the relatives mentioned in the biographies in order to build a continuous, genealogical network, which can be used in Digital Humanities for data and network analysis of historical academic people and their lives. An artificial neural network approach is presented for solving a supervised learning task to disambiguate relatives mentioned in the register descriptions using basic biographical information enhanced with an ontology of vocations and additional occasionally sparse genealogical information. Evaluation results of the record linkage are promising and provide novel insights into the problem of historical people register reconciliation. The outcome of the work has been used in practise as part of the in-use AcademySampo portal and linked open data service, a new member in the Sampo series of cultural heritage applications for Digital Humanities.

Keywords

  • Data reconciling
  • Biographies
  • Linked data
  • Digital humanities

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The portal and its linked open data service, including a SPARQL endpoint, was released on February 5, 2021. More information about AcademySampo can be found on the project homepage: https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/projects/yo-matrikkelit/.

  2. 2.

    Cf. the project homepage https://iisg.amsterdam/en/hsn/projects/links and research papers at https://iisg.amsterdam/en/hsn/projects/links/links-publications.

  3. 3.

    http://www.sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com.

  4. 4.

    https://ylioppilasmatrikkeli.helsinki.fi.

  5. 5.

    https://ylioppilasmatrikkeli.helsinki.fi/1853-1899.

  6. 6.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Helsinki.

  7. 7.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Academy_of_Turku.

  8. 8.

    This statistical result was obtained after we used the reconciled data in AcademySampo for data analysis.

  9. 9.

    https://ylioppilasmatrikkeli.helsinki.fi/henkilo.php?id=14689.

  10. 10.

    https://keras.io/api/layers/reshaping_layers/flatten/.

  11. 11.

    https://keras.io/api/layers/core_layers/dense/.

  12. 12.

    https://keras.io/api/layers/merging_layers/concatenate/.

  13. 13.

    https://stanford.edu/~shervine/blog/keras-how-to-generate-data-on-the-fly.

  14. 14.

    https://api.triplydb.com/s/IE4w29n0T.

  15. 15.

    https://www.ldf.fi/dataset/yoma.

  16. 16.

    https://jena.apache.org/documentation/fuseki2/.

  17. 17.

    https://varnish-cache.org.

  18. 18.

    https://www.docker.com.

  19. 19.

    https://yasgui.triply.cc.

  20. 20.

    https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/intro.ipynb.

  21. 21.

    https://jupyter.org.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Yrjö Kotivuori and Veli-Matti Autio for their seminal work in creating the original databases used in our work, and for making the data openly available. Discussions with Heikki Rantala, Esko Ikkala, Mikko Koho, and Jouni Tuominen are acknowledged. This work is part of the EU project InTaVia: In/Tangible European Heritage (https://intavia.eu/), and is related to the EU COST action Nexus Linguarum (https://nexuslinguarum.eu/the-action) on linguistic data science. CSC – IT Center for Science provided computational resources for the work.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo), Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

    Petri Leskinen & Eero Hyvönen

  2. HELDIG – Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Eero Hyvönen

Authors
  1. Petri Leskinen
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  2. Eero Hyvönen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Petri Leskinen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

    Prof. Dr. Andreas Hotho

  2. Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Assoc. Prof. Eva Blomqvist

  3. University of Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Stefan Dietze

  4. IBM Research - Thomas J. Watson Research, Hawthorne, CA, USA

    Achille Fokoue

  5. University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA

    Ying Ding

  6. Imperial College, London, UK

    Payam Barnaghi

  7. Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Armin Haller

  8. Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Povo, Trento, Italy

    Dr. Mauro Dragoni

  9. The Open University Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, UK

    Harith Alani

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Leskinen, P., Hyvönen, E. (2021). Reconciling and Using Historical Person Registers as Linked Open Data in the AcademySampo Portal and Data Service. In: Hotho, A., et al. The Semantic Web – ISWC 2021. ISWC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12922. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88361-4_42

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