Page 116 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

116 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.9, 2017

2014). In China, the construction of historical GIS started in 2000. In the past several years, the
development of information technology has been changing rapidly. Data has become the first
productive force and data-driven research has become the fourth research paradigm. What’s
more, Internet thinking has been sweeping across the globe. Thus it becomes especially important
whether the data in the system is easy to access and be taken advantage of. Internet symbolizes
collaboration, sharing and openness. The more specialized, the more valuable it is to carry on open
sharing. So the question is whether the existing historical GIS can satisfy the open application
under the World Wide Web.
In response to this problem, the author has made research on the CHGIS, CCTS, THCTS based
on rational database, CBDB which integrated the historical geography data of CHGI, “Sino-
family-tree GIS” which is used to organize and present specific literature, Getty Thesaurus of
Geographic Names launched on the basis of LD, and GeoNames data sets. During the research, the
data modeling, the application of the databases, historical and open access of historical geography
data under the Internet environment have been the major focus.
With respect to data modeling, in the process of building “Sino-family-tree GIS” by Nanjing
Normal University, Chen Min studied the spatial-temporal structure of genealogical GIS, took
place names as entities and analyzed the spatial characteristics, spatial affiliations, administrative
relationships and other aspects of ancient and current place names in detail (M. Chen, 2009). In the
master’s thesis written by Hu Ying, the geographical entities with spatial features were separated
from place names. The thesis made an in-depth analysis of the geographical entities, the temporal
and spacial features of place names as well as their changes in the life cycle (Y. Hu, 2008). Wen
Yongning et al. proposed to construct a spatial-temporal description framework for genealogical
GIS to support temporal and spatial information recorded in all genealogies so that all events and
human activities in the genealogy can be unfolded under a unified spatial-temporal model. This
model emphasizes on the unified expression of time and space in the genealogical literature (Wen,
lǘ, M.Chen, Su, & D. Hu, 2010). The basic function of the CHGIS data model is to describe the
subordinate relations and the boundaries between the administrative units, and to express the
changes of the place names as well as the boundary changes caused by the merging, separation,
new construction and revocation of administrative units. Users are allowed to recombine the data
in the database according to the time and space they need. In addition, the data also need to track
the changes of geographic patterns of one administrative unit and how the changes of this unit
exert influence on other administrative units. The basic concept of CHGIS model is to retrieve
the changes of administrative units by time (Center for Historical Geographical Studies of Fudan,
2016). Following CHGIS, CBDB also relies on two types of spatial entities: Addresses and Places
(latitude and longitude). As historical instances of place designation that refer to an administrative
jurisdiction bounded in space with a particular name, “Addresses” can be part of the jurisdictions.
The locations of Addresses are determined by the intersection of x-y coordinates (latitude and
longitude). If either the boundaries or the name changes, a new address must be created (Fu, 2011).