Page 117 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

XIA Cuijuan / The opening and application of Chinese historical geography data in Digital Humanities projects of libraries 117

Although CHGIS and CCTS made informative description on different patial-temporal attributes
and historical changes of place names, due to the complexity of temporal and spatial relationships
of historical geography data, a clear data model which describes the relationships among various
place names in different historical periods in the same geospatial has not yet been established
and the authority control over place name is inadequate. Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
and GeoNames lay emphasis on the administrative attribution and geospatial description of place
names, but lack the time-series data corresponding to the place names. Thus, the modeling and
formalized expression of the correlations among various place names at different ages have been
lacking (Berman, 2012).
In terms of the utilization of historical geography data, Sino-family-tree GIS provides query
service on ancient and current place names as well as historical chronological data on its website.
It mainly provides users with reference in function. The objective of historical geography data
construction is to serve for the query and display of the genealogical literature in this system.
CHGIS data can be downloaded from the website, but its format is the professional .map or .mdb
format which is quite complex. In order to excavate and manipulate the data, it is necessary to
acquire certain expertise and computer technology, which has caused some barriers for most
humanists. There is still a certain distance from humanists and the general public to CHGIS
and CCTS which are professional support platforms of historical geographic information. Zhou
Bingfeng and Zhou Wenye from Capital Normal University have developed a Chinese historical
geography digital application platform based on CHGIS out of trying to narrow this distance. The
application platform provides an user-friendly interface, automatic generation of special historical
maps and so on. Historical GIS can be established according to user’s requirements with the
functions provided by the analysis software embedded in the platform. The platform reduces the
threshold for humanists to use the GIS technology to a certain extent (B.F. Zhou & W.Y. Zhou,
2007).
In terms of the open application of historical geography data under the Internet environment,
the practices of CCTS and CBDB are recommended. Although the existing historical GIS such
as CHGIS and CCTS mainly adopt relational database technology in data modeling, meaning
that the underlying data is stored in a closed relational database, they provide a large number
of application programming interfaces (APIs) for developers to call. These APIs are the Restful
APIs built on the HTTP protocol of the Internet and meet the data open application requirements
under the Internet environment at the data call level. The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
of Getty Research Institute and GeoNames encode and publish data on the Web following the
LD technology standards. Each geographical term is given an HTTP URI, realizing the unique
identification and positioning of place names in web-scale. More information about a place name
such as its administrative division, latitude and longitude is encoded in W3Cstandard Resource
Description Framework (RDF). The cross-platform and cross-system features make it convenient
for machines to read and process. This technical framework which is based on LD has laid the