Eero Hyvönen: Linked Data in Action – Sampo portals for Digital Humanities (Data for History Lecture #1)

This talk presents results on building an open national Semantic Web infrastructure in Finland, with applications for Digital Humanities. In particular, the Sampo model and series of Sampo portals have been created that have had millions of users on the Web.

The talk discusses key elements of the infrastructure and tools, and the portals in use and under development in ongoing research projects. Our work illustrates a shift of focus in research on Cultural Heritage semantic portals, based on Linked Data, and envisions and proposes new directions of research. Three generations of portals are identified: Ten years ago the research focus in  semantic portal development was on data harmonization, aggregation, search, and browsing (“first generation systems”). At the moment, the rise of Digital Humanities research has started to shift the focus to providing the user with integrated tools for solving research problems in interactive ways (“second generation systems”). The next step ahead to “third generation systems” is based on Artificial Intelligence: future portals not only provide tools for the human to solve problems but are used for finding research problems in the first place, for addressing them, and even for solving them automatically under the constraints set by the human researcher. Such systems should preferably be able to explain their reasoning, which is an important aspect in the source critical humanities research tradition. The second and third generation systems set new challenges for both computer scientists and humanities researchers.

More information:

• Background paper: Eero Hyvönen: Using the Semantic Web in Digital Humanities: Shift from Data Publishing to Data-analysis and Serendipitous Knowledge Discovery. Semantic Web, Vol. 11, Nr. 1, pp. 187-193,  2020. https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/publications/2020/hyvonen-swj10-2019.pdf
• Recent webinar “Digital Humanities in Action “ related to the topic with additional material and videos: https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/events/2020/2020-10-29-sampo-portals/

The ideas of the talk and some Sampo portals in action are illustrated and demonstrated in the short videos below:

• Semantic Web and AI for Digital Humanities:  https://vimeo.com/470313703
• LetterSampo – Historical Letters of the Semantic Web: https://vimeo.com/461293952
• AcademySampo – Finnish Academic People 1640-1899: https://vimeo.com/462993654
• BiographySampo – Artifical Intelligence Reading Biographies for the Semantic Web: https://vimeo.com/328419960
• WarSampo – Finnish World War II on the Semantic Web: https://vimeo.com/212249404
• Building a National Level Linked Open Data Infrastructure for Digital Humanities in Finland: https://vimeo.com/460086143

Lecture within the Data for History Lectures series
Zeit: Wednesday, 2 December 2020, 4.15-5.45 pm
Ort: via Zoom  – Request access via email (digitalhistory@hu-berlin.de)  

 

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