Prosopographical Views to Finnish WW2 Casualties Through Cemeteries and Linked Open Data

This paper presents an application for studying the death records of WW2 casualties from a prosopograhical perspective, provided by the various local military cemeteries where the dead were buried. The idea is to provide the end user with a global visual map view on the places in which the casualties were buried as well as with a local historical perspective on what happened to the casualties that lay within a particular cemetery of a village or town. Plenty of data exists about the Second World War (WW2), but the data is typically archived in unconnected, isolated silos in different organizations. This makes it difficult to track down, visualize, and study information that is contained within multiple distinct datasets. In our work, this problem is solved using aggregated Linked Open Data provided by the WarSampo Data Service and SPARQL endpoint.