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BiographySampo – Publishing and Enriching Biographies on the Semantic Web for Digital Humanities Research

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The Semantic Web (ESWC 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11503))

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Abstract

This paper argues for making a paradigm shift in publishing and using biographical dictionaries on the web, based on Linked Data. The idea is to provide the user with enhanced reading experience of biographies by enriching contents with data linking and reasoning. In addition, versatile tooling for (1) biographical research of individual persons as well as for (2) prosopographical research on groups of people are provided. To demonstrate and evaluate the new possibilities, we present the semantic portal “BiographySampo – Finnish Biographies on the Semantic Web”. The system is based on a knowledge graph extracted automatically from a collection of 13 100 textual biographies, enriched with data linking to 16 external data sources, and by harvesting external collection data from libraries, museums, and archives. The portal was released in September 2018 for free public use at http://biografiasampo.fi.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://global.oup.com/oxforddnb/info/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.anb.org/aboutanb.html.

  3. 3.

    http://www.ndb.badw-muenchen.de/ndb_aufgaben_e.htm.

  4. 4.

    http://www.biografischportaal.nl/en.

  5. 5.

    https://sok.riksarkivet.se/Sbl/Start.aspx?lang=en.

  6. 6.

    http://biografiakeskus.fi.

  7. 7.

    https://www.finlit.fi/en.

  8. 8.

    http://persistence.uni-leipzig.org/nlp2rdf/specification/core.html.

  9. 9.

    http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/.

  10. 10.

    http://kansallisbiografia.fi.

  11. 11.

    http://5stardata.info/en/.

  12. 12.

    http://data.nationallibrary.fi/bib/me/CFENNI.

  13. 13.

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

  14. 14.

    https://www.kansallisgalleria.fi/en/avoin-data/.

  15. 15.

    http://snellman.kootutteokset.fi/.

  16. 16.

    http://kirjasampo.fi.

  17. 17.

    https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/ontologies/histo/.

  18. 18.

    See http://www.ldf.fi for more details.

  19. 19.

    http://jena.apache.org/documentation/serving_data/.

  20. 20.

    https://www.varnish-cache.org.

  21. 21.

    http://hipla.fi.

  22. 22.

    http://mapwarper.onki.fi.

  23. 23.

    https://github.com/timwaters/mapwarper.

  24. 24.

    http://www.sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Business Finland for financial support and CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland, for computational resources.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

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

    Eero Hyvönen, Petri Leskinen, Minna Tamper, Heikki Rantala, Esko Ikkala & Jouni Tuominen

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

    Eero Hyvönen, Esko Ikkala & Jouni Tuominen

  3. Finnish Literature Society (SKS), Helsinki, Finland

    Kirsi Keravuori

Authors
  1. Eero Hyvönen
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  2. Petri Leskinen
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  3. Minna Tamper
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  4. Heikki Rantala
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  5. Esko Ikkala
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  6. Jouni Tuominen
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  7. Kirsi Keravuori
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eero Hyvönen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA

    Pascal Hitzler

  2. KMi, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    Miriam Fernández

  3. University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Krzysztof Janowicz

  4. Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Amrapali Zaveri

  5. Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK

    Alasdair J.G. Gray

  6. IBM Research, Dublin, Ireland

    Vanessa Lopez

  7. The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Armin Haller

  8. Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden

    Karl Hammar

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Hyvönen, E. et al. (2019). BiographySampo – Publishing and Enriching Biographies on the Semantic Web for Digital Humanities Research. In: Hitzler, P., et al. The Semantic Web. ESWC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11503. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21348-0_37

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21348-0_37

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