Page 119 - 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 119

can be extended for these concepts such as the spatial existence, time horizon, latitude and
longitude. Unfortunately, RDA has not yet entered the stage of its full implementation in Chinese
cataloging. And BIBFRAME is still in the stage of experimental exploration and research.
Shanghai Library adopted BIBFRAME 2.0 as its core data model, expanded bf:Place, increased
attributes such as latitude and longitude as well as administrative region affiliation, and modeled
the genealogical place names extracted from genealogies. Although the thesaurus of place names
has been published on the Web by using LD and provides an open application program interface
for developer to call, it lacks the time series data. The thesaurus only includes place names of the
present, not of the ancient times.
To sum up, the existing professional historical GIS is hard to be directly applied to the
construction of DH projects in libraries because of its professionalism and complexity. Although
the library has laid down a certain foundation to DH in terms of full-text and metadata of digital
resources, it is basically missing in the storage of historical geography data. Therefore, it is
difficult to realize the resource integration and association based on space, especially in the multi-
dimensional spatial-temporal structure. Particularly, when analyzing contents and structuring
data of large-scale literature resources, place names need to be extracted and matched. However,
in various ancient books and archives, place names have emerged as the actual situation of these
resources’ time. For example, the same geospatial may appear in different ancient books published
in different eras with different names. Thus, how to combine and disambiguate these place names
in order to realize name authority control under the Internet environment becomes an urgent
problem waiting for solution.

2.2 The goals and needs of the open application of Chinese historical geography data in
library Digital Humanities construction

Although historical geography has distinct interdisciplinary features, it is also highly professional
and sets up a relatively high threshold for application, requiring for expertise. If we just bring
others’ experience directly for constructing library DH projects, there will be great difficulties in
the absence of enough historical geography professionals as well as cutting-edge talents in GIS
technology. In order to solve the most pressing issue, certain objectives should be selected and
achieved step by step. Therefore, the author suggests that large and medium-sized libraries, on the
basis of the existing historical GIS, construct historical geographic knowledge base (hereinafter
referred to Knowledge Base) applicable to library field by making use of name authority control
and knowledge organization in which they are good at, and Web technologies. When meeting the
requirements of versatility, usability and convenience, the demand for open application of historical
geography data in the Internet environment should be satisfied so as to provide the data for more
small and medium-sized libraries. It should be pointed out in particular that Chinese historical
geography knowledge base mentioned in this paper only includes historical geography data but