Linked death - Representing, publishing, and using Second World War death records as linked open data

Abstract

War history of the Second World War (WW2), humankind's largest disaster, is of great interest to both laymen and researchers. Most of us have ancestors and relatives who participated in the war, and in the worst case got killed. Researchers are eager to find out what actually happened then, and even more importantly why, so that future wars could perhaps be prevented. The darkest data of war history are casualty records-from such data we could perhaps learn most about the war. This paper presents a model and system for representing death records as linked data, so that 1) citizens could find out more easily what happened to their relatives during WW2 and 2) digital humanities (DH) researchers could (re)use the data easily for research.