Page 120 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

Ying WANG, Zhixiong ZHANG, Hui SUN & Feng LEI / A method of semantic representation and 119
organization of the historic knowledge on contemporary China

organization of text items. The same fact from different source items not only verifies its accuracy
but also reflects close relationships between text items. The text items about the same knowledge
object or fact can be organized together for historical biography, institutional evolution, historical
data compilation, book writing, etc, and also provide references for the history research on
contemporary China.
(3) Semantic organization in fact/object dimension
The contemporary Chinese historical ontology implements effective organization of historical
knowledge by providing specific semantic representation on historical knowledge objects and
facts. Moreover, it makes knowledge exploration possible including retrieval, association,
ranking, clustering, reorganization, and so on. On the one hand, it supports fine-grained retrieval
of knowledge rather than text resources, as structured query on the facts of the ontology can be
implemented with SPARQL language. On the other hand, the same type of knowledge objects
can be gathered based on their semantic association, the facts about a knowledge object can be
used to build a map describing this object, and then realize knowledge integration flexibly for
various applications.
As mentioned above, the “Organizing up” method implements multi-dimensional display of
the historical knowledge at a higher level. Meanwhile, based on knowledge objects and facts,
these text items can also be associated with external resources such as historical books, literatures,
materials, web pages or databases, and can be used to develop extended applications of the
historical knowledge on contemporary China.

3 Effects of semantic representation and organization

Based on the above method, we developed a system, providing knowledge representation,
reorganization, and association, as well as realizing innovative applications such as knowledge
map visualization, relevance analysis, reorganization of the history facts, etc.

3.1 Implement knowledge map visualization

A knowledge map provides knowledge navigation and gradual guide service on domain knowledge
(Wang, Gu, & Su, 2013). Based on the historical knowledge network, we implemented knowledge
map visualization to display the associated network of knowledge objects, in which nodes represent
knowledge objects and edges represent semantic relations (see Figure 5). Users can intuitively
get the required historical knowledge without needing to read the text information. The map can
also be taken as a visual navigation for more knowledge by clicking on nodes. This improves the
efficiency of knowledge acquisition.