There are some two million lines of poetry in Kalevala meter in the archives of the Finnish Literature Society, collected mainly in the 19th century and the 1st half of the 20th century. About two thirds of this material has been published in the 34-volume Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot "Ancient Poems of the Finnish People" (1908-1948, and 1993), and all published materials are available as a digital corpus (the so called SKVR corpus) on the web since 2007. The Kalevala poems are usually divided into four groups: epic poetry, lyric songs, wedding songs and incantations.

　　The poems in Kalevala meter were collected mainly thanks to the initiative of the Finnish Literature Society, established in 1831. Elias Lönnrot (the Society"s first secretary) compiled the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, on the basis of traditional Kalevala poetry. The first edition appeared in 1835, the second and greatly enlarged edition in 1849.

　　Within the semantic web project FinnONTO, the Finnish Literature Society has previously participated in annotating the Kalevala. The general goal of this large project is to combine benefits and synergy of Web 2.0 and semantic web technologies and demonstrate the results in various semantic web portals and applications. The semantic web forms a service that enables creating a content based metadata level for making EDP searches. In such a way, the semantic web complements and improves the capabilities of the accustomed use of the web. In the next phase it would be necessary to annotate the Kalevala more precisely according to the principles of primary features of the Kalevala poetry and to form an annotation framework that would take into consideration the specificity of the traditional narration of the Kalevala poetry. One aim of the project would be to trace the editorial selections of Elias Lönnrot, by comparing Kalevala and the Finnic traditional oral versions of the Kalevala poetry that Lönnrot had at his disposal. One of the possibilities lies in creating an interactional research environment on the basis of the semantic web technologies. The end result of combining the potential of the SKVR corpus and the semantic web would be the prospective Critical eEdition of the Kalevala.