Page 112 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

A method of semantic representation and organization

of the historic knowledge on contemporary China 1①

1
12 ∗
Ying WANG , Zhixiong ZHANG , Hui SUN & Feng LEI 2
2
1 National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
2 The Institute of Contemporary China Studies, Beijing 100009, China

Abstract
China has a huge volume of historical resources on its contemporary history. However, the organization
of these historical resources is not satisfactory. On the basis of related studies, this paper proposes
a method, which is called “Mining down, Organizing up”, to represent and organize the historical
knowledge on contemporary China. Based on a contemporary Chinese historical ontology, this
method extracts knowledge objects and facts from unstructured historical text items, forms a historical
knowledge network on contemporary China, and realizes multidimensional knowledge organization
at a higher level based on the relations such as time, subclass, hierarchy, and statistics. Based on this
method, we represented and organized the historical knowledge on contemporary China from text
resources, and developed a system to implement historical knowledge visualization, reorganization
and other new applications including knowledge maps, relevance analysis, and national historical
fact reconstruction etc. This study shows that the “Mining down, Organizing up” method can realize
the fine-grained representation of the historical knowledge on contemporary China and innovative
application of knowledge organization based on historical knowledge objects. It can be used as a kind of
new knowledge representation and organization methods applicable in other fields.

Keywords
History on contemporary China, Ontology, Text mining, Knowledge organization

0 Introduction

With the development of digitization and network technologies, information resources of the
history on contemporary China are increasing in high speed and have numerous varieties.
However, their organization and management modes are relatively simple, and thus lots of valuable
knowledge is hidden in those resources and cannot be discovered and utilized easily. It becomes
an urgent problem to mine implicit knowledge scattering in a large number of historical resources
and to organize the knowledge based on its internal relationship. The solution to this problem will
facilitate further processing and sharing of these information resources, promote the publicity and
popularization of historical knowledge on contemporary China, and help historical researchers
① This article is an outcome of the project “Knowledge web of the history of the People’s Republic of China” supported by the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
* Correspondence should be addressed to Zhixiong ZHANG, Email: zhangzhx@mail.las.ac.cn, ORCID: 0000-0003-1596-7487