Page 121 - 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 121

Use standardized and universal data encoding format. Data encoding format is closely
related to the convenience of data sharing. The standardized and universal data encoding format
facilitates the transmission and interoperation of data in heterogeneous systems, as well as data
read and processing in different application development environments.
Provide Web-based open data services. Web is the main vehicle of the Internet, creating an
environment of data access almost anywhere at any time. The conventional choice of open data
application under the Internet environment is to provide data (API) based on HTTP protocol which
is the infrastructure of Web.

3 Research on the construction of Chinese historical geography knowledge
base for Digital Humanities

3.1 Chinese historical geography data Modeling—Ontology-based spatial-temporal
model design

On the basis of researching on the data model of CHGIS, CTSS, CBDB and Sino-family-tree GIS,
taking the universality, ease of use and convenience as the goal, and the open and extensibility
as the principle, the author designs the spatial-temporal model of historical geography data by
using knowledge ontology (ontology for short) in order to meet the demand of open application of
historical geography data in the construction of DH project.
Ontology is the formalized definition of the relationships between concepts in a specific field.
Concept is the abstraction of the characteristics of the same kind of entity object. Generally, it
is represented by Class. The same entity object in reality may be defined as different classes in
different fields. However, consensus should be reached with consistent connotation and extension
for the entity object in the same field. The various characteristics of concepts are called Data
Property, and the relationships between concepts are called Object Property. Property is generally
defined by Domain and Range. The concept pointed by the Domain of a property determines
what kind of concept entity (instance) can be described by this property. Range defines the value
constraints of the property. The scope of Data Property is text or value in general while the scope
of Object Property is the entity object to which a concept corresponds. Formalization emphasizes
machine-readable. Ontology is a simulation of the real world and its purpose is to digitize the
objects and their properties existing in reality and makes them machine readable. This is the bridge
between the real world and the machine world. Due to its object-oriented idea, ontology is given
good extensibility. In addition, it achieves good openness because of the relevant standards
and guidelines pushed forward by W3C and other institutions, together with its good
integration with Semantic Web and LD technologies. As a result, ontology has become an
effective knowledge organization method and been widely used in data modeling in various
fields during recent years.