Page 92 - 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 091

knowledge, and then gain a sense of identity. At the same time, users can find out the information
about the collected ancestors as well as the genealogy documents on this platform. Click on
“Collection Information”, users can learn further information about all the collection organizations
and their location. For example, if this genealogy is collected by the Shanghai Library, a full-text
image link will be displayed directly. On the right area of the homepage, there are functions as
basic search portal and advance search portal being displayed in the mode of automatic carousel.
Users can input retrieval words to conduct the query.
For querying for the documents without a specific goal, the concrete genealogical title and the
family’s living place name, the space-time diagram can be utilized to explore. Time is designed as
a knob. So when users rotate the knob or input the year, the genealogy created in this year will be
displayed and the location of the place will be marked with a flag on the map. Click on the flag, all
the eligible genealogies will be shown.
(2) For professional researchers
Professional researchers include the genealogy experts specialized in a certain surname and a
family, or researchers in other domains who use genealogy documents to provide materials and
evidence for their research subjects. For this type of users, the platform develops such functions
as conceptual-matching based advanced search as well as temporal-spatial correlation-based
discovery function.
Advanced search supports precise search by conceptual entities such as surname, author, the
family’s living place name, clan temple title, ancestor or celebrity, and collection organization.
Shanghai Library, as the collection organization for Hu’s Genealogy of ShangchuanMingjing, is
not only a name, but also an entity. The Shanghai Library not only has its full name “上海图书馆”
but also its abbreviation “上图” in Chinese. It also contains the address information of “No.1555,
Middle Huaihai Road, Shanghai”. Most importantly, it is given a universally unique identifier
“http: //data.library.sh.cn/entity/organization/11v6pvzycw 5419sy”. So whenever inputting “上海
图书馆” or “上图” or their traditional Chinese characters, the entity itself will be located via this
unique identifier, and all the genealogy documents of this entity by the collection organizations can
be found. Therefore, regardless of the attribute values of this entity inputted, in traditional Chinese
or simplified Chinese, the research results keep the same. Above all, this description information
exists enduringly at the underlying data, independent of the function and logic of system and
can keep their semantics during the process of cross-platform and cross-system transmission and
exchange.
The query is realized by using SPARQL retrieval language. SPARQL is the dedicated query
language of RDF data and directly oriented to the search for knowledge. SPARQL is irrelevant to
physical storage structure, but only related to the internal knowledge logic of data itself (Harris &
Seaborne,2013).
The family’s living place name is the same case. It no longer exists in the form of a character
string, but instead as an entity which corresponds to a real existing place. This entity not only