Linked Data - A Paradigm Shift for Publishing and Using Biography Collections on the Semantic Web

This paper argues for making a paradigm shift in publishing and using biographical dictionaries on the Web, based on Linked Data. The idea is to represent biographical data in a harmonized, semantically interoperable form, which enables 1) data enrichment by aggregating linked content from complementary, distributed, and heterogeneous data sources, as well as by reasoning, and 2) development of intelligent services using machine “understandable” data. Based on the aggregated global knowledge graph, published in a SPARQL endpoint, tooling for 1) biographical research of individual persons as well as for 2) prosopographical research on groups of people can be provided. As a demonstration of these ideas, we discuss the new in-use linked data service and semantic portal BIOGRAPHYSAMPO - Finnish Biographies on the Semantic Web that quickly attracted thousands of end users on the Web. This semantic portal is based on a knowledge graph extracted automatically from a collection of 13 100 textual biographies, written by 980 scholars. The texts are enriched with data linking to 16 external data sources and by harvesting external collection data from libraries, museums, and archives. Reasoning is used for query expansion and for discovering serendipitous relations between entities, such as persons and places.