Page 122 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

Ying WANG, Zhixiong ZHANG, Hui SUN & Feng LEI / A method of semantic representation and 121
organization of the historic knowledge on contemporary China

resulted knowledge map shown in Figure 6. It displays related conferences, documents, events,
persons, institutions, etc., and mutual connections. While “The Third Plenary Session of Eleventh
Central Committee of the Communist Party of China” was held after Chairman Mao’s death, we
can still find multiple indirect relations between them by using relevance analysis. It can help to
discover potential relationships between knowledge objects and facilitate the understanding of
related history knowledge.

Figure 6. Example of relevance analysis.

3.3 Reorganization of historical facts

The most typical application of historical knowledge is to show historical context. Different from
the period metadata of original text items, this study uses accurate time (“month” or “day”). In the
historical ontology, the Time class can be used to represent knowledge more exactly, for instance,
the establishment date of political parties, institutions and social groups, the occurrence time of
events and conference, the proposed time of principles and concepts, etc. All these information
can be used for memorabilia, chronicle or something else. Figure 7 shows the historical activities
of Chairman Mao in 1949. These data are obtained based on indirect relations between the Person
class and the Time class. In the historical ontology, the Time class is associated with other classes