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WarSampo Instructions

The users of WarSampo are 1) people 2) machines.

WarSampo Portal for Human Users

The content of WarSampo is provided through nine different perspectives:

  1. Video Events. Events of the Winter and Continuation War visualized using a timeline and a map with related linked data.
  2. Video Persons. Data about persons with related links from various sources.
  3. Army Units. Events and other related data about army units visualized using i.a. maps.
  4. Video
    Places. Search and browse places and maps covering the war zone area in Finland and discover addional data such as events and photographs linked to places.
  5. Video Kansa taisteli magazine articles. Faceted semantic search for Kansa taisteli magazine articles containing mostly memoirs of soldiers related to WW2.
  6. Video Casualties. A table-like view of war casualty records that can be filtered using faceted semantic search, enriched with links to other WarSampo datasets.
  7. Photographs. Browse the content of the Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive with faceted search.
  8. War Cemeteries. Search and browse the War Cemeteries and their statistics.
  9. Prisoners of War. Browse and analyze information about the Finnish prisoners of war, using faceted semantic search.

In order to search of browse the content, you must first select a perspective from the front page or using the dropdown button on the navigation bar. After you have selected a resource, which can be e.g. an army unit or place, you are provided with 1) detailed information about the resource, and 2) related data to the resource. This related data originates from other WarSampo datasets or other linked open data services such as DBpedia.

The content of WarSampo consists of several datasets, e.g.
  1. Casualties data (93,000 death incidents) includes data about the deaths in action during the wars. Source: The National Archives of Finland.
  2. Around 160,000 photographs from the Second World War from a time period of six years. Source: Military Museum.
  3. Karelian maps (47 wartime maps of Karelia) and Senate atlas (404 historical maps of Southern Finland). Source: National Land Survey of Finland and Wikimaps project.
  4. Finnish Geographic Names Registry (800 000 places). Source: National Land Survey of Finland.
  5. Karelian map names, some 35,000 georeferenced locations covering the war zone area in Finland that was finally annexed by the Soviet Union. Source: Jyrki Tiittanen/ National Land Survey of Finland and Semantic Computing Research Group. Aalto University.
  6. The Kansa taisteli magazine (3,360 articles).Source: Bonnier, The Association for Military History in Finland and Timo Hakala.
  7. War Diaries (23,000 diaries), digitized authentic documentations of the troop actions in the frontiers. Source: The National Archives of Finland.
  8. Organization cards (ca 500 army units & ca 300 persons & 642 battles). Source: The National Archives of Finland.
  9. Wartime events (11 300). Source: Semantic Computing Research Group. Aalto University.
  10. Prisoners of war register. Source: The National Prisoners of War Project.

Additionally many other literature and other sources have been utilized in the creation of WarSampo data.

WarSampo Data service

WarSampo Data is available as Linked Open Data. The data is provided via Linked Data Finland publishing platform, which provides a SPARQL API and other Linked Data services such as full dataset download, URI redirection, Linked Data browsing and also a variety of other services such as editing, documentation, validation, and visualization. The different perspectives of the WarSampo Portal are built on top of the SPARQL API. Application developers can utilize the content of WarSampo by either downloading a full dataset, using the SPARQL API or referencing the pages generated by the WarSampo portal with this template: 

https://www.sotasampo.fi/en/PERSPECTIVE?uri=URI
.

The content of WarSampo has been transformed and harmonized into a knowledge graph by using semantic web techologies in the WarSampo project led by the Semantic Computing Research Group at Aalto University. The project is part of the Open Science and Research Initiative organized by Ministry of Education and Culture.