Overview
Paradigm Shift: Biographies as Linked Data for Digital Humanities
History is made by people. Biographical data about historical persons is therefore important for virtually any time machine of the past. Biographical dictionaries, a historical genre dating back to antiquity, are scholarly resources used by the public and by the academic community alike.
BiographySampo aims to make a paradigm shift in publishing biographical data on the Web. The system is based on a Linked Open Data service on top of which seven search and browsing applications as well as tooling for data analysis, network analysis, and visualizations are provided for biographical research on individual persons as well as for prosopographical research on groups of people [1]. The data was created by extracting knowledge from over 13 100 short biographies published by the Finnish Literature Society (FLS), using language technology, and by enriching the data by linking it to 16 external data sources, such as Wikipedia/Wikidata, collection databases of memory organizations, and national semantic web data services. BiographySampo is a member in the series of semantic web “Sampo” systems based on Linked Open Data that have been used by up to millions of people on the Semantic Web, depending on the Sampo.
From the National Biography of Finland to BiographySampo
The National Biography of Finland (NBF), published by the FLS, started out as an on-line publication in 1997, a decade before its publication as a 10-volume book series was completed. In addition to the NBF, the FLS has published several other peer-reviewed biographical collections on-line, such as the Finnish Clergy (1552–1920) and and the Finnish Generals and Admirals in the Russian Armed Forces (1809–1917). Involving 980 scholars, the national biography project coordinated by the FLS has been arguably the largest project of history research in Finland, covering in time the whole history of Finland.
Even if lots of biographical information is available online for humans to read and interpret, the information is seldom available as machine readable data for 1) Digital Humanities research and 2) to be used in Cultural Heritage (CH) portals, such as Europeana and Digital Public Library of America, or 3) for developing applications for the public by creative industries. Furthermore, the information is distributed in different national data silos using heterogeneous formats and is written in different languages. This makes aggregation and reuse of biographical data challenging.
BiographySampo presents a new solution in use to this general challenge using as a case study the Finnish national biographies. The semantic portal was published on September 2018, and the underlying data service was opened under CC BY 4.0 next year.
Resources of the Web
BiographySampo portal:
BiographySampo Linked Open Data service:
https://www.ldf.fi/dataset/nbf
Video about BiographySampo:
Project homepage with publications:
https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/projects/biografiasampo/en/
Reference
[1] Eero Hyvönen, Petri Leskinen, Minna Tamper, Heikki Rantala, Esko Ikkala, Jouni Tuominen and Kirsi Keravuori: BiographySampo – Publishing and Enriching Biographies on the Semantic Web for Digital Humanities Research. The Semantic Web. ESWC 2019 (Pascal Hitzler, Miriam Fernández, Krzysztof Janowicz, Amrapali Zaveri, Alasdair J.G. Gray, Vanessa Lopez, Armin Haller and Karl Hammar (eds.)), pp. 574-589, Springer-Verlag, 2019.
https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/publications/2019/hyvonen-et-al-eswc-2019.pdf
Project partners
Public datasets
Linked Data publication as a data service with several graphs
License: CC BY
With financial support by
Business Finland, Media Industry Research Foundation of Finland, Academy of Finland, Ministry of Education and Culture, several Finnish companies, Aalto University, University of Helsinki