German National Socialist Injustice on the Semantic Web: from Archival Records to a Knowledge Graph

Archival repositories contain vast amounts of historical data within unstructured textual documents, posing significant challenges for extracting coherent insights. This paper presents ongoing work towards an optimised workflow for constructing a knowledge graph from millions of archival records related to the “Wiedergutmachung” process in Germany. These records, documenting compensation and restitution efforts following World War II, offer insights into the aftermath of the National Socialist regime. The proposed workflow involves converting document images to machine-readable formats, ontology design, information extraction, and entity linking. Leveraging both traditional methods and transformer-based technologies, the workflow addresses unique challenges inherent in historical documents.