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Publication type: Articles in peer reviewed conference proceedings
Abstract: The Sampo model and its Sampo-UI framework have become an established approach for publishing Cultural Heritage and Digital Humanities data on the Semantic Web. Sampo-UI enables exploration of data originating from SPARQL endpoints through faceted search across multiple views with seamlessly integrated visualization and data analytic tools. Here, we present two contributions to the Sampo-UI ecosystem: (i) a separation of Sampo-UI core from application-specific configuration; decoupling core and application simplifies updates and facilitates reuse of efforts, and (ii) the use of Ontop — a virtual knowledge graph system — to expose relational databases through a SPARQL endpoint and Sampo-UI. The use of relational databases and reuse of tooling and expertise around relational databases lower the operational burden of publishing small-to-medium-sized datasets typical of digital humanities projects. These contributions originated outside the original Sampo-UI team but were developed in collaboration with it, and are being prepared for upstream integration. We illustrate the approach with two projects at Ghent University: one on Roman coin finds in Belgium (NuMAD) and one on historic Belgian company data (BelHisFirm). Both portals run the same Sampo-UI core with a different configuration, and operate on existing institutional relational database infrastructure without a dedicated graph database.
Cite this article:
@inproceedings{six2026sampoui,
author = {Six, Joren and Chetti, Jahid and Ahola, Annastiina and Lamsens, Frederic and Rantala, Heikki and Hyv{\"o}nen, Eero},
title = {{Sampo-UI Meets Ontop}: Publishing Relational Digital Humanities Data on the {Semantic Web}},
booktitle = {Posters, Demos, Blue Sky, and Tutorials at SEMANTICS 2026},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
address = {Ghent, Belgium},
url = {https://0110.be/files/attachments/582/sampo-ui_ontop-semantics_2026.pdf}
}
