The Finnish registries "Ylioppilasmatrikkeli" 1640-1852 and 1853-1899 contain detailed biographical data about virtually every academic person in Finland during the respective time periods. This paper presents first results on transforming these registries into a Linked Open Data service using the FAIR principles. The data is based on the student registries of the University of Helsinki, formerly the Royal Academy of Turku, that have been digitized, transliterated, and enriched with additional

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... ata about the people from various other registries. Our goal is to transform this largely textual data into Linked Open Data using named entity recognition and linking techniques, and to enrich the data further based on links to internal and external data sources and by reasoning new associations in the data. The data will be published as a Linked Open Data service on top of which a semantic portal "AcademySampo" with tools for searching, browsing, and analyzing the data in biographical and prosopographical research are provided.