The Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU) is proud to announce it has renewed a Cooperating Partnership agreement with Aalto University, in Espoo, Finland.
DARIAH is a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) whose mission is to empower research communities with digital methods to create, connect and share knowledge about culture and society. In addition to having 20 member states and one observer country, DARIAH has also established a network of cooperating partners in non-member countries.
Aalto University, established in 2010, is a multidisciplinary merger of three major universities of Finland, the Helsinki University of Technology, the University of Applied Arts, and the Helsinki School of Business. The contact point between Aalto and DARIAH is the Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo) at the Department of Computer Science, which is also a close partner to the Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG), hosted at the University of Helsinki. The focus area of the starting collaborations between DARIAH and Aalto is Semantic Web infrastructures for Digital Humanities (DH).
“I am really pleased to see that Aalto has renewed as a DARIAH Cooperating Partner,” said Edward Gray, DARIAH Officer for National Coordination. “Not only is this an important step in national Membership for Finland, but also Aalto brings longstanding and robust expertise in semantic web that can help DARIAH and our partners from day one.”
Semantic Web for Digital Humanities
The SeCo group has been building the national Finnish Semantic Web infrastructure for 20 years in Finland. This work includes:
- national ontology services hosted today by the National Library of Finland as the Finto.fi service,
- the Linked Data Finland platform LDF.fi for publishing and using datasets with its 7-star publishing model, extending Tim-Berners Lee’s classic 5-star model, and
- the “Sampo” model and series of linked open data services and semantic portals focusing on Cultural Heritage data and DH applications.
Many of the Sampo applications are widely used. For example, the “BookSampo” portal hosted by the Finnish Public Libraries has up to 2 million users per year, while the “WarSampo – Finnish World War II on the Semantic Web” system, based on data from the National Archives of Finland, Finnish Defence Forces, Wikipedia, and several other organizations, has had some 860 000 users in total.
International Sampo applications for DH research include the Mapping Manuscript Migration system, that publishes linked data of about over 200 000 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts or the LetterSampo system, used for studying epistolary data of the Republic of Letters 1500–1800.
“In collaboration with DARIAH, lessons learned, linked data published and software developed in the Finnish Semantic Web infrastructure could be reused, applied and developed further in a larger European context” says professor Eero Hyvönen of Aalto, who is also director of the Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG) at the University of Helsinki, Department of Digital Humanities.
Finland has been a full partner of CLARIN but has recently joined DARIAH with Cooperating Partners agreements. Last year, a new national consortium, FIN-CLARIAH, was accepted on the national Finnish research infrastructure roadmap of the Academy of Finland. Finland aims to combine CLARIN and DARIAH-related infrastructures into one, following the CLARIAH initiative in the Netherlands. The work of Aalto in FIN-CLARIAH will focus on Semantic Web infrastructures for DH, further supported by starting collaborations with DARIAH.
For more information on the Cooperating Partners membership in DARIAH, their role, tasks and benefits, have a look at our detailed post here.
More on Semantic Web from Aalto
Video: “The Semantic Web and AI for Digital Humanities” https://vimeo.com/470313703
Video: “How to Create a National Cross-domain Ontology and Linked Data Infrastructure and Use it on the Semantic Web” https://vimeo.com/620820788
*Cover image: Aalto University, Photo by Mikko Raskinen
