Page 96 - 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 095

data whose place is Macheng city:
http：//data.library.sh.cn/jp/data/familyName=夏&place=麻城?key=yourAPIKey
For developers who are proficient in using SPARQL query language, they can use Sqarql
Endpoint to conduct more complicated query and data access.
The website “data.library.sh.cn”, as the open data platform by the Shanghai Library, will
continue to release different kinds of terminology, standard archive, and collection bibliographic
data on the internet and provide various data consumption interface for developers to call so as to
facilitate the bibliographic control, authority control and data co-construction and sharing based
on the internet.

4 Effect, problem and prospect

The genealogy knowledge services platform makes use of the modern information technologies,
and presents experts’ findings and the knowledge in our brain on the platform to share with the
public. Resources and various statistical analysis as well as visualized research tools are used to
make the resources play their full value. The Shanghai Library took the lead among domestic
libraries to launch the linked data technologies for open data access. The platform has attracted
broad attention once online. China Culture Daily, Wen Hui Bao, and Xinmin Evening News
reported the news. Hundreds of genealogy research enthusiasts and various civil research societies
participated in the platform evaluation and gave their feedbacks.
We came across some difficulties during the process of constructing genealogy knowledge
services platform. The biggest problem is the mapping of and the conversion from the existing
metadata records to the genealogical ontology framework. The existing metadata were recorded
according to the traditional literature-oriented indexing method. But the genealogical ontology
emphasizes both the literature properties and the content properties. So we need to scatter the
original metadata records and map them to the genealogical ontology framework. Although the
records of The General Catalog of Chinese Genealogiesis are quite authoritive, some of the data
are still inconsistent. As a result, it brings some difficulties and obstacles for data conversion. For
example, the inconsistency in the abbreviation of collection organizations is one of the problems.
The Chinese University of Hong Kong Library is among the collection information of genealogy
documents in The General Catalog of Chinese Genealogies. The name is sometimes abbreviated
as “香港中大” or “香港中文大学” in Chinese. The kind of problem is not exceptional, and it will

influence the recall ratio to a large extent. Our solution is to revise all the “香港中文大学” into “香
港中大” according to the organization index of the book. By using this method, no matter which
word they input “香港中大” or “香港中文大学图书馆”, users will find out all the genealogy
resources collected by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library. However, this solution
is merely an afterward remedy. Another resolution is to understand the inconsistent problem in
existing data in advance (This is obviously a very demanding task). We take “香港中大” and “香