WarVictimSampo 1914–1922: a National War Memorial on the Semantic Web for Digital Humanities Research and Applications

This article presents the semantic portal and Linked Open Data service WARVICTIMSAMPO 1914-1922 about the war victims, battles, and prisoner camps in the Finnish Civil and other wars in 1914-1922. The system is based on a database of the National Archives of Finland and additional related data created, compiled, and linked during the project. The system contains detailed information about some 40,000 deaths extracted from several data sources and data about over 1,000 battles of the Civil War. A key novelty of WARVICTIMSAMPO 1914-1922 is the integration of ready-to-use Digital Humanities visualizations and data analysis tooling with semantic faceted search and data exploration, which allows, e.g., studying data about wider prosopographical groups in addition to individual war victims. The article focuses on demonstrating how the tools of the portal, as well as the underlying SPARQL endpoint openly available on the Web, can be used to explore and analyze war history in flexible and visual ways. WARVICTIMSAMPO 1914-1922 is a new member in the series of "Sampo" model-based semantic portals. The portal is in use and has had 23,000 users, including both war historians and the general public seeking information about their deceased relatives. ; Peer reviewed