Page 125 - 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 125

227 and 233 seperately, the emperor’s posthumous name was Ming Emperor and his name was Cao
Rui. Through the reign title, the beginning year and ending year or other properties can contrast
and transform the Chinese chronology and the year of the Christian calendar. If you want to locate
a specific year or get the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches of this year, then you implement
it by algorithm. For example, if you want to know the corresponding Christian year of the second
year of Hongwu, just add 1 to its starting time of 1368, then you can know the second year of
Hongwu in Ming Dynasty was 1369. The temporal properties of a place, place name, or related
event may not be directly referenced to the data of the time model. Both historical chronology and
the year of Christian calendar can be used. The corresponding Chinese historical calendar and the
year of Christian calendar can be obtained by using the contrast and transformation provided by
the Chinese chronology and the year of the Christian calendar.
The entity/instance objects like place, place names, events, time are uniquely identified by the
URIs so as to access, locate and link to objects.

3.2 Technical implementation scheme of Chinese historical geography data open
application

The implementation of the functions of ontology-based data model proposed in 4.1 requires the
related technical support. In the Semantic Web proposed by W3C, ontology is at the level of data
model. Its purpose is to digitize the entity objects in the real world so that machine can make
query, calculation, and even simple reasoning on their features as well as the relationships between
these entity objects. In order to achieve this purpose, we need support from the relevant underlying
implementation technologies. This section will illustrate the technical implementation scheme
for ontology-based Chinese historical geography data open application from two aspects of data
encoding as well as data publication and open application.

3.2.1 Data encoding
To make historical geography data more widely used, it is suggested to adopt the RDF, the
recommended standard by W3C as well as the encoding method used by GeoNames, as the data
abstract model and data encoding format. The standard system of RDF includes the RDF abstract
data model, the minimum unit of which is a triple constituted by subject-verb-object, RDF/XML,
Turtle, N3, JSON and a succession of data encoding formats (also known as serialization formats)
that meet different data transmission or processing purposes, and adapt to various application
development environments. Subject-verb-object is the universal model of knowledge organization
and description. It is also well compatible and versatile like the entity object-property-property
value of ontology. The various encoding formats of RDF are recommended standard by W3C.
They can well support data exchange and transfer among heterogeneous systems and are easily
processed by all kinds of popular programming languages. More importantly, the encoded RDF