Page 112 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

The opening and application of Chinese historical

geography data in Digital Humanities projects of
libraries

〇a *
XIA Cuijuan〇
Shanghai Library, Shanghai 200031, China

Abstract
Through the methods of literature review, data modeling, comparative research, experimental research,
and based on the research of Chinese historical geography databases of CBDB of Harvard University,
CHGIS of Fudan University, CCTS of Center for GIS of Academia Sinica, Sino-family-tree GIS and
GeoNames, etc., this paper analyzes the requirements of applying History Geography data in libraries’
Digital Humanities projects. With the research on the topic of open application of historical geography
data in libraries, this paper tries to explore the methods of application of Historical Geography for
Digital Humanities in libraries and how the libraries can use the methods of knowledge organization
and Name Authority Control to help researchers in humanity area to use Historical Geography Data
during their research work, and then publish the data on the Web to make it ready for open application
and easily sharing with other libraries. This paper focuses on the spatial-temporal modeling based
on ontology and technology framework based on Linked Data, which are designed for the opening
application of historical geography data in the environment of Internet.

Keywords
Historical geography, Digital Humanities, GIS, Linked data

0 Introduction

With the rapid development of modern information technologies such as big data, text mining,
geographic information system (GIS), information visualization, virtual reality (VR), augmented
reality (AR) and their profound applications in humanities research, Digital Humanities (DH),
with its interdisciplinary and cross-domain characteristics, has become a strong supplement and a
powerful impetus to traditional humanities research in terms of research methods. Spatial Analysis
based on GIS technology has been widely applied in humanities and social sciences such as
economics, history, linguistics and anthropology, and has gradually formed a new research method
taking space as the starting point (Nash &Asencio, 2008). It has attracted researchers and scholars
from various research fields and provided traditional humanities and social science research with a
brand new research perspective.

* Correspondence should be addressed to XIA Cuijuan, Email: cjxia@libnet.sh.cn, ORCID: 0000-0002-1859-6979