Abstract Manuscripts are a crucial form of evidence for research into all aspects of premodern European history and culture, and there are numerous databases devoted to describing them in detail. This descriptive information, however, is typically available only in separate data silos based on incompatible data models and user interfaces. As a result, it has been difficult to study manuscripts comprehensively across these various platforms. To address this challenge, a team of manuscript scholars and computer scientists worked to create “Mapping Manuscript Migrations” (MMM), a semantic portal, and a Linked Open Data service. MMM stands as a successful proof of concept for integrating distinct manuscript datasets into a shared platform for research and discovery with the potential for future expansion. This paper will discuss the major products of the MMM project: a unified data model, a repeatable data transformation pipeline, a Linked Open Data knowledge graph, and a Semantic Web portal. It will also examine the crucial importance of an iterative process of multidisciplinary collaboration embedded throughout the project, enabling humanities researchers to shape the development of a digital platform and tools, while also enabling the same researchers to ask more sophisticated and comprehensive research questions of the aggregated data.

This paper argues for making a paradigm shift in publishing and using biographical dictionaries on the web, based on Linked Data. The idea is to provide the user with enhanced reading experience of biographies by enriching contents with data linking and reasoning. In addition, versatile tooling for (1) biographical research of individual persons as well as for (2) prosopographical research on groups of people are provided. To demonstrate and evaluate the new possibilities, we present the semantic portal “BiographySampo – Finnish Biographies on the Semantic Web”. The system is based on a knowledge graph extracted automatically from a collection of 13 100 textual biographies, enriched with data linking to 16 external data sources, and by harvesting external collection data from libraries, museums, and archives. The portal was released in September 2018 for free public use at http://biografiasampo.fi .