Reassembling the Lives of Finnish Prisoners of the Second World War on the Semantic Web

Abstract

This paper presents the first results of a new, ninth application perspective for the semantic portal WarSampo – Finnish WW2 on the Semantic Web, based on a database of ca. 4 450 Finnish prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. Our key idea is to reassemble the life of each prisoner of war by using Linked Data, based on information about the person in different data sources. Using the enriched aggregated data, a biographical global “home page” for each prisoner of war can be created, that is more complete than information in individual data sources. The application perspective is targeted to the researchers of military history, to study and analyze the data in order to form new research questions or hypotheses, as well as to public in the large looking for information, e.g., about their relatives that were captured as prisoners of war. Employing the faceted search of the application perspective, prosopographical research on subgroups of prisoners is possible.