Paper Info
Title
Modeling and Using an Actor Ontology of Second World War Military Units and Personnel.
Abstract
This paper presents a model for representing historical military personnel and army units, based on large datasets about World War II in Finland. The model is in use in WarSampo data service and semantic portal, which has had tens of thousands of distinct visitors. A key challenge is how to represent ontological changes, since the ranks and units of military personnel, as well as the names and structures of army units change rapidly in wars. This leads to serious problems in both search as well as data linking due to ambiguity and homonymy of names. In our solution, actors are represented in terms of the events they participated in, which facilitates disambiguation of personnel and units in different spatio-temporal contexts. The linked data in the WarSampo Linked Open Data cloud and service has ca. 9 million triples, including actor datasets of ca. 100 000 soldiers and ca. 16 100 army units. To test the model in practice, an application for semantic search and recommending based on data linking was created, where the spatio-temporal life stories of individual soldiers can be reassembled dynamically by linking data from different datasets. An evaluation is presented showing promising results in terms of linking precision.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1007/978-3-319-68204-4_27
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Keywords
Field
DocType
Semantic web,Linked open data,Actor ontology,Digital humanities,Biographic representation
Ontology,Military personnel,World Wide Web,Semantic search,Computer science,Linked data,Military science,Knowledge management,Semantic Web,Data as a service,Ambiguity,Database
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
10588
0302-9743
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
12
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Petri Leskinen101.35
Mikko Koho2149.77
Erkki Heino371.61
Minna Tamper451.55
Esko Ikkala5129.62
Jouni Tuominen617827.45
Eetu Mäkelä718823.10
Eero Hyvönen8843103.43