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084 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 8, 2016

in one region, and the distributed living places of a clan in different genealogy documents can be
found.
(3) Knowledge evolution and accumulation based on User Generated Content (UGC). Genealogy
is the historical land chart and census register which records the stemma and its stories or the
development process of the family reproduction by the consanguineous group of the same clan
and ancestor. There are a large number of nongovernmental groups and communities who have a
deep understanding and research on their own surnames and genealogies. They are both the library
users and experts on genealogy study. They have more comprehensive and deeper understanding
on certain surnames or certain family genealogies than librarians have. If we construct an open
platform which can not only provide the genealogy materials collected by the library, but also
facilitate positive interaction and communication between users, users and collection institutions,
while reorganizing, processing and preserving the knowledge generated from communication,
the purpose of optimizing the genealogy knowledge base as well as augmenting its value in
communication and dissemination can be achieved. Along with the popularity of Web 2.0
technology and the widespread of UGC’s concepts of “Crowdsourcing” and “Crowdfunding”, it is
common to take users’ behaviors into the opreation process of the library (Fan, 2011). As a result,
the new genealogy knowledge services platform should not only be a static featured database but
also the organism supporting the continuous growth and evolution of knowledge.

2 Design implementation

Linked data technology is implemented in building the genealogy knowledge services platform
because it organizes knowledge based on domain conceptual system (ontology) instead of
documents, and describes and retrieves knowledge via RDF universal data model which can
be written in an RD triple by the grammatical constitutes (subject, verb, object). By using the
developed data proof and knowledge mining tools to support the maintenance and update of
knowledge, users are allowed to access parts of the document data instead of the whole document.
On the other hand, with the widespread and profound application of linked data in libraries
(Mitchell, 2013), a set of technology, methodology and process of metadata, ontology, RDF data
conversion, RDF data storage and querying, and data visualization has been formed and can
meet the requirements of bibliographic control and authority control, data reusing and sharing,
knowledge organization and discovery.
The design of genealogy knowledge service platform by the Shanghai Library went through the
following process. Firstly, we designed the genealogy ontology which was downward compatible,
easy to extend, convenient for reusing and sharing, and supports the data reorganization and
knowledge modeling of genealogy. In addition, concepts such as person, institution, place, event and
their relationships in genealogy were explicitly defined. Secondly, we cleaned the existing genealogy
metadata and extracted conceptual entities and assigned HTTP URI for each entity. Based on the