Maintaining a Linked Data Cloud and Data Service for Second World War History

One of the great promises of Linked Data is to provide a shared data infrastructure into which new data can be imported and aligned with, forming a sustainable, ever growing Linked Data Cloud (LDC). This paper studies and evaluates this idea in the context of the WarSampo LDC that provides a data infrastructure for Second World War related ontologies and data in Finland, including several mutually linked graphs, totaling ca 12 million triples. Two data integration case studies are presented, where the original WarSampo LDC and the related semantic portal were first extended by a dataset of hundreds of war cemeteries and thousands of photographs of them, and then by another dataset of over 4450 Finnish prisoners of war. As a conclusion, lessons learned are explicated, based on hands-on experience in maintaining the WarSampo LDC in a production environment.Peer reviewe

Dissidents, Rebels, and Everyday Heroes: New Perspectives on the Digital Archiving of Cultural Resistance Under State Socialism

The aim of this article is to present and study how a digital archive can shape and create new ways of producing, publishing, and studying historical sources. Based on our analysis of the COURAGE (Cultural Opposition—Understanding the CultuRal HeritAGE of Dissent in the Former Socialist Countries) Registry about cultural dissent under state socialism in Eastern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century (and focusing on collections about environmental issues in this registry), we seek to understand how different private, amateur, and professional archivists have shaped the scientific and public legacy of cultural dissent under state socialism. The COURAGE Registry conveys a unique view of the history of the Soviet Bloc, providing an assemblage of documents concerning people, groups, institutions, events, and pieces from the time. Together, they tell an alternative story of cultural opposition under socialism, shedding light on important—but until now marginalized—problems, topics, and actors. Our results have shown that cultural opposition in the Registry is understood and constructed as a wide range of forms of engagement and activities, and it is not limited to specific high-cultural or direct political products. The structure of the COURAGE Registry creates a balance among collections that are very diverse in form, and its linked data structure helps connect the information and stories compiled in it. The COURAGE Registry enables researchers to use it as a tool with which to build their own scientific narratives about dissent under socialism