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Finland submitted nine suggestions altogether for this year’s European Union and Europa Nostra Cultural Heritage Prizes. WarSampo has been nominated in the category for research and digitization projects.

‘Our collaboration partner in the museum sector encouraged us to participate in the competition with WarSampo’s portfolio. It’ll be interesting to see how a research project like WarSampo will fare in the competition,’ says Professor Eero Hyvönen from the Department of Computer Science.

Two subprojects are ongoing in WarSampo, where collaboration partners submit the necessary data and a research group led by Hyvönen is responsible for modifying the data and creating the layer of semantic links, so that all the information can be linked together in the WarSampo Portal. New utilization cases and connections are being planned for the data on top of the data service, and the production of communal data is also being researched.

‘The Association of Finnish Camera Clubs has received funding from the War Heroes' Memorial Foundation for photographing war cemeteries. WarSampo’s information networks already contain information on these war heroes, and now around 3 200 war cemetery photographs will be added to WarSampo as open data. In addition, a database of Finnish prisoners of war from the USSR and additional materials such as prisoner interviews will be added to WarSampo as open data. This will be implemented in collaboration with the Association for Cherishing the Memory of the Dead of the War and the National Archives of Finland,’ Hyvönen notes.

Plácido Domingo, a world-renowned opera singer and Chairman of the cultural heritage organisation Europa Nostra, will arrive in Finland on 13 May 2017. Domingo will award the joint European Union and Europa Nostra cultural heritage prizes in Turku together with Tibor Navracsics, who is the European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport.

The award ceremony is part of the European Heritage Congress, a larger European cultural heritage event, which will be arranged in Turku on 10–14 May 2017, as part of the programme for the 100th anniversary of Finland’s independence. Around 300–400 European cultural heritage organisation representatives are expected to participate in the event.

WarSampo is one of Aalto University's Finland 100 projects.

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