Publishing Second World War History as Linked Data Events on the Semantic Web

Abstract

Data about wars is typically heterogeneous, distributed in the data silos of the fighting parties, multilingual, and often controversial depending on the political point of view. It is therefore hard for the historians to get a global picture of what has actually happened, to whom, where, when, and how. We argue that Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies are a very promising approach for modeling, harmonizing, and aggregating data about war history. Our goal is to make it possible, for both historians and laymen, to study history in a contextualized way where linked datasets enrich each other. The paper presents the in-use WarSampo 1 system, where massive collections of heterogeneous data about the (Finnish) history of the Second World War are harmonized using an event-based approach, and provided as a Linked Open Data service for applications to use. As a use case, a semantic portal WarSampo providing six different perspectives to the war based on events is presented.