Page 82 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

XIA Cuijuan, LIU Wei, CHEN Tao & ZHANG Lei / A genealogy data services platform implemented with linked data technologies 081

bibliographic data format standard.
The Shanghai Library has been paying close attention to open data movement and started
tracking, researching, and developing relevant technologies from early on. Open data movement
is deemed as a new opportunity to bring the digital library into the next generation internet which
is featured by the data technology. For the Shanghai Library, although the digitization of the paper
documents as well as the literature retrieval service of the large amount of historical literature
resources such as ancient books, genealogies, correspondences, modern documents, documents of
the Republican period of China, archive, photographs, notes, manuscripts, and tabloids has been
ongoing, to better satisfy the readers’ demands, the knowledge contained needs to be described.
By using new technologies to provide services on the internet to more users, the open data
technologies involve in the optimization and iteration of system as well as the construction of the
contents so as to realize the platform system, which will become an indispensable place for readers
to engage themselves in their study, communication and research.
Chinese genealogy is one of the most important characteristic literatures of the Shanghai Library.
After long-term research and arrangement, the Shanghai Library has made some influential
achievements, including compiling and publishing Summary of Genealogies Held by Shanghai
Library, The General Catalog of Chinese Genealogies, General Theory of Chinese Genealogies,
Selected Documents of Chinese Genealogies. The General Catalog of Chinese Genealogies,which
collects more than 54,000 kinds of genealogies from over 600 institutions in Japan, Korea,
North America, Germany, Australia, and other regions and countries, includes 608 surnames and
separates out over 70,000 ancestors and celebrities, 1,600 places, more than 30,000 clan temple
titles. The catalog is not only a union catalog of Chinese genealogies but also an encyclopedia
of Chinese genealogy knowledge. Although these precious achievements exist in paper or image
forms and the content and index revelation is only for publication purpose or provides simple
search fields, they provide a foundation for developing a knowledge services platform on the basis
of linked data.
Through many years of research and exploration, the technical research and development team
of the Shanghai Library expects that it is the time to apply the new data management technology
represented by linked data. The technologies will enable libraries to make full use of the long-
term accumulated literature research achievements and to make fine-grained descriptions of the
data, facts and other knowledge within them. Coding methods and technical means of network
knowledge organization are utilized to reorganize the resources. The Internet platform in web-
scaleis used to achieve the purpose of bibliographic control. As for the genealogical data, they
need to support various services such as faceted visual browsing, semantic search and knowledge
mining for researchers in humanities while satisfying general users’ needs for tracing their family
roots. The linked data technologies contribute to breaking the traditionally isolated condition for
different kinds of resources, advancing data open, promoting knowledge flow and giving full play
to the potential value of the resources in the process of open use.