Page 118 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

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

foundation for authority control of place names under the Internet environment. HTTP URI makes
the place name data closely associated with the Internet in the process of identification and access.
RDF has the features of versatility and openness in the data format and can meet the open data and
sharing requirements under the Internet environment. Owing to LD technology, GeoNames has
joined the Linked Open Data Project and has become one of the most widely used datasets on the
Web (Schmachtenberg, Bizer, & Paulherm, 2014).

2 The opening and application of Chinese historical geography data
in Digital Humanities projects of libraries: Problems, goals and needs

2.1 The application of Chinese historical geography in library field

For the library which undertakes the functions of social education and knowledge dissemination,
to better organize and present the large-scale collection of digital literature resources by DH
methods and to provide the humanists with more accurate services is the feature and starting point
of libraries’ DH projects. Modern historical geography is one of the most important methods in
DH. However, the existing data, technologies and methods in historical GIS set a high technical
threshold for users in the library field. On the one hand, user groups of university and research
libraries, especially the public libraries, include not only researchers but also undergraduates and
the general public. Thus, it’s necessary to convert professional data into popular and universal
knowledge, and to reduce the threshold of GIS tools’ application. On the other hand, the library
collections and human resources of most libraries are limited and the lack of historical geography
professionals makes data sharing and opening increasingly important, especially the open
application on the Internet.
In the long-term practice of resource cataloging, the library has accumulated a large number
of metadata records with normative structures. Among the most widely adopted MARC and DC
metadata specifications in the field of library, there are simple descriptions for geospatial such as
the 650,651,043 fields in MARC and the dc:spatial attribute in Dublin core metadata. However,
the values of these fields and attributes are texts composed of strings, lacking of geospatial
attributes such as latitude and longitude as well as the place names’ changes and association at
different times. In recent years, Resource Description Access (RDA) and BIBFRAME, a new
bibliographic framework designed to replace MARC, further advanced the processing of place
names. The object-oriented methodology in computer science was introduced and the specific
geospatial perspective was taken as the entity existing in reality. Concepts such as rda:Place
and bf:Place have been abstracted from entities so as to associate with various concepts in the
bibliographic data (such as works, manifestations and singletons). Although the storage of
historical geography data is still lacking of attention, the framework now possesses the conditions
for introducing historical geography data. In specific applications, historical geographic attributes