Linked Open Data Infrastructure for Digital Humanities in Finland
Eero Hyvönen · Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Publications · 2020
This paper presents and overviews Linked Open Data Infrastructure for Digital Humanities in Finland (LODI4DH), a joint initiative of Aalto University, Department of Computer Science, and University of Helsinki (UH), Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG), for creating a national data infrastructure and Linked Data services for open science. The data and services enable publication and utilization of datasets for data-intensive Digital Humanities (DH) research in structured, standardized formats via open interfaces. LODI4DH is based on a large national collaboration network and software created during a long line of national projects in DH between UH and Aalto since 2003. This work has created several in-use infrastructure prototypes, such as the ONKI and Finto ontology service now at the National Library of Finland, the Linked Data Finland data publishing platform LDF.fi, and the “Sampo” series of semantic portals testing and demonstrating the usability of the approach in practical applications. Thus far, these systems have had millions of end-users on the Web suggesting a high potential of utilizing the technology and Linked Data infrastructure in DH.