Mikko Lappalainen

Development Manager, National Library of Finland

Development Manager Mikko Lappalainen has a background in humanities, with a strong interest in making humanities relevant in the digital age.

Mikko has worked in various positions in The National Library of Finland, developing linked open data technologies in the past five years. Mikko is the project Manager of the Finto ontology project that develops an ecosystem of linked open ontologies. He has also worked in several collaboration groups between various memory organisation sectors, dreaming of shared and intellectual systems that would make data understandable across organizational borders. Mikko sees the role of Libraries in the internet era as information curators with a strong know-how that could be useful to several actors in different fields.

Linked open data is about sharing information and meaning, and in that sense related to the age old pursuits in finding a universal language that would connect people no matter what the origin. As we know, these pursuit have often failed, and that is why we need to answer “why” and “what for” before we can answer “how”. Why is linked open data a good thing? What do we want to do with it? To what extent it is possible to have open data that would be useful to all?