=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2980/paper330
|storemode=property
|title=Using FindSampo
Linked Open Data Service and Portal for Spatio-temporal Data Analysis
of Archaeological Finds in Digital Humanities
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2980/paper330.pdf
|volume=Vol-2980
|authors=Heikki Rantala, Esko Ikkala, Mikko Koho, Jouni Tuominen, Ville Rohiola, Eero Hyvšnen
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/semweb/RantalaIKTRH21
}}
==Using FindSampo
Linked Open Data Service and Portal for Spatio-temporal Data Analysis
of Archaeological Finds in Digital Humanities==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2980/paper330.pdf
Using FindSampo Linked Open Data Service
and Portal for Spatio-temporal Data Analysis of
Archaeological Finds in Digital Humanities
Heikki Rantala1[0000−0002−4716−6564] , Esko Ikkala1[0000−0002−9571−7260] , Mikko
Koho1,2[0000−0002−7373−9338] , Jouni Tuominen1,2,3[0000−0003−4789−5676] , Ville
Rohiola4[0000−0002−7844−5312] , and Eero Hyvönen1,2[0000−0003−1695−5840]
1
Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo), Aalto University, Finland
https://seco.cs.aalto.fi, firstname.lastname@aalto.fi
2
Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (HELDIG), University of Helsinki, Finland
3
Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH),
University of Helsinki, Finland
4
Finnish Heritage Agency (FHA), Finland
https://www.museovirasto.fi/en, firstname.lastname@museovirasto.fi
Abstract. This paper presents and demonstrates how FindSampo, a
Linked Open Data (LOD) service and semantic portal, can be used for
Digital Humanities research, based on Finnish Citizen Science archaeo-
logical data integrated with GIS services. The system has been in public
use since May 2021.
Keywords: Data Analysis · Semantic Web · Digital Humanities · Archaeology
1 FindSampo Framework for Archaeological Finds
Recreational metal detecting has already a quite long-lasting tradition in
Europe but during the last decade this popular hobby has spread even more
and grown rapidly in many countries such as in Finland. At the same time,
several countries have started to develop digital reporting services to collect, an-
alyze, and study archaeological data [3]: 1) Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS)5
records archaeological discoveries found by the public in England and Wales
since 1997 [1]; 2) Digital Metal Finds (DIME)6 is an online platform for report-
ing metal detecting finds in Denmark [11]; 3) Portable Antiquities of the Nether-
Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative
Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
5
PAS: https://finds.org.uk/database. Some 1.4 million finds have been reported in
PAS by more than 14,000 citizens by now.
6
DIME: https://www.metaldetektorfund.dk
lands (PAN)7 is an online portal in use in the Netherlands [10]; 4) MEDEA8 is
an online portal developed in Flanders for metal detectorists [2,11].
FindSampo [6] is a new framework9 aiming to improve the reporting pro-
cess and analysis of archaeological finds based on collaborations between the
public, academic researchers, archaeologists, and heritage managers [8]. This
paper demonstrates, how the FindSampo Portal10 , opened for public use on
May 17, 2021, can be used for data exploration, analysis, and visualizations. The
portal is based on a LOD service11 that can also be accessed directly. The service
currently contains data about archaeological finds made by the public in Finland
that have been cataloged to the collections of the Finnish Heritage Agency (FHA)
between 2015 and 2020. In contrast to the aforementioned related works, Find-
Sampo makes use of semantic web technologies and is integrated with tools for
Digital Humanities (DH) research. Based on the “Sampo” model [5], the Find-
Sampo Portal is yet another member in the Sampo series12 of LOD services
and semantic portals that utilize the national Semantic Web DH infrastructure
LODI4DH13 .
2 Using FindSampo for Spatial and Temporal Analysis
The FindSampo Data Service includes currently over 3000 archaeological
finds made by the public. The FindSampo Portal queries this data service with
SPARQL, and offers search, exploration, and analysis tools for DH researchers
and hobbyists. The finds can be filtered using faceted search [9] with hierarchical
facets based on ontologies, and then visualized using maps with external layers
from the GIS services14 of the FHA, various types of charts, and a timeline.
Faceted search can be used to get the information of some specific find, and it
can also be used to analyze and compare groups of finds. The individual finds are
presented as a table as the default option on wider screens, or as a more mobile
friendly list with mobile devices. The various charts and timelines can be used
to visualize the relative distributions of selected groups of finds. For example,
pie charts can be used to compare the distributions of provinces for Iron Age
and medieval finds, by making the appropriate selections from the period facet.
The map visualizations can be used to show finds made by the public and
the registered archaeological sites of FHA. As an example, Fig. 1 shows finds
(green markers, one of which is opened) and protected archaeological sites (red
areas) along the Aura River in Turku, the former capital of Finland. A buffer
7
PAN: https://portable-antiquities.nl
8
Metaaldetectie en Archeologie (MEDEA): https://vondsten.be
9
More information and publications can be found on the project homepages at https:
//seco.cs.aalto.fi/projects/sualt/ and https://blogs.helsinki.fi/sualt-project.
10
The portal is available at https://findsampo.fi.
11
The LOD service is available at: https://www.ldf.fi/dataset/findsampo.
12
The Sampo portals are described at https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/applications/sampo/.
13
https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/projects/lodi4dh/
14
https://kartta.museoverkko.fi/?lang=en
zone of 200 meters where metal detecting is not recommended is automatically
calculated and shown around the sites with a dashed line. The finds can be visu-
alized using different base maps and map layers (selected in the box on the top
right) including, e.g., street maps, satellite images, and a lidar-based elevation
model. The maps can be used by researchers for analysis, and by hobbyists to
get information on promising places to practice metal detecting as well as on
protected sites where detecting should be avoided.
Fig. 1. Archaeological finds and protected sites along the Aura River in the City of
Turku as shown in the FindSampo portal.
As an example of temporal data-analysis, Fig. 2 shows a timeline visualization
where all weapon finds have been filtered out using the object type facet. The
timeline view of the finds groups them by province in which they were found (y-
axis) and by period (x-axis). The start and end years for the periods are retrieved
from the period ontology developed with domain experts, and the periods are
indicated by the colors listed on the top. The user can observe that there are
Stone Age and Bronze Age weapons found in only a few provinces, but there
are Iron Age weapon finds from every province. Interestingly, not every province
has medieval or later weapon finds.
Each individual object find has its own “home page” that contains detailed
information about the find. The object types and periods have their own pages
in the same way.
The FindSampo Data Service can also be used directly for research by
querying the data with SPARQL and then by creating analyses of the results
with, for example, Python or R libraries. As the data service is open, it can also
be used to create new web services such as the FindSampo Portal by anyone.
Fig. 2. The portal’s timeline visualization of all weapon finds.
The user interface of the portal is implemented with the Sampo-UI frame-
work [7], and the source code is available on GitHub15 with an open license. The
LOD service is run on the Linked Data Finland platform16 [4], which is pow-
ered by a combination of the Fuseki SPARQL server17 and a Varnish Cache web
application accelerator18 for routing URIs, content negotiation, and caching.
3 Discussion and Future Work
FindSampo takes the current state of the art of archaeological find databases
a step further by providing a framework for utilizing Linked Data. To test and
demonstrate the LOD approach, a prototype portal was presented that can be
used to easily access and analyze data. Currently the public demonstrator is only
for the Finnish data but the framework can be applied as well to international
archaeological finds data in the future. We have already done preliminary tests
on adapting the framework to the Portable Antiquities Scheme data19 of the
British Museum.
Acknowledgements. Our work was funded by the Academy of Finland.20
Thanks to CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland, for computational resources.
15
https://github.com/SemanticComputing/findsampo-web-app
16
https://ldf.fi
17
https://jena.apache.org/documentation/fuseki2/
18
https://varnish-cache.org
19
https://finds.org.uk
20
Decision numbers 310854, 310859, and 310860
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