Page 87 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

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

in Chinese history. In order to facilitate the sharing and reusing of genealogical ontology, the
Shanghai Library has released to the public the genealogical ontology on the Web, encoded
in RDFs and OWL. What’s more, the website supports three kinds of view modes to bring
convenience to specialists in this field for a deeper understanding of the ontology. The visualization
of Model View displays the relationship between genealogical ontology classes and properties.
Class View, through the hierarchical relationship between superior class and subclass, presents
the classes and properties. List View demonstrates the classes and properties according to the
alphabetic list of the name of classes as well as property. The genealogical ontology and all the
RDF data can be downloaded from the website (See Figure 1) .

Figure 1. The genealogical ontology of shanghai library published by linked data.

2.2 Standard open data format: From RDB to RDF

The third principle of linked data requires the RDF format of data. The abstract format of RDF data
and a variety of serialization formats such as RDF/XML、Turtle、JSON-LD are the standards
recommended by W3C. These standard data formats are cross-platform, open and can be processed
by different program languages (Cyganiak, Wood, & Lanthaler, 2014).
The RDF data of the genealogy knowledge services platform are generated from the pre-existing
metadata not only from The General Catalog of Chinese Genealogies, but also from the metadata
of the newly added genealogy documents. First of all, entities such as work, instance, item,
person, institution, name of place are extracted from metadata and each entity is assigned with a
HTTP URI. Then the classes and properties which are defined by genealogical ontology are used