Page 195 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

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Extended English abstracts of articles published in the Chinese edition of Journal of Library Science in China 2017 Vol.43 195

Designing a data model of Chinese ancient books for evidence-based practice

〇a*
XIA Cuijuan〇, LIN Haiqing & LIU Wei
Ancient book catalogs and ancient literature are important sources and evidence material for many
Humanities and Social Science research. Traditional research related to ancient books usually relies
on experts’ expertise or subjective judgment. The emerging Digital Humanities can help scholars
to gather relevant information as completely as possible. It can help to raise research questions
from bigger spatio-temporal scenes and conduct intensive research across a variety of subjects with
unprecedented perspectives. This requires developing a digital humanity platform with relatively
complete data and more applicable advanced technologies. A data model that can integrate
different formats of different kinds of ancient book catalog data is the basis of this platform.
In this paper, we are proposing a data model of Chinese ancient books using cutting-edge
ontology and linked data technology to support researchers to accomplish a so called “evidence-
based practice”. The data model is based on the knowledge of classical bibliography combining
with philology, bibliology, and so on. This research also intends to explore the new methods of the
use of the ancient catalog and documentation to support researches in various disciplines, such as
historical research, linguistics, sociology, literature, culture and arts. Web ontology and linked data
are the latest achievements of the semantic technologies. They are the most suitable and applicable
technologies for developing “authority control” and “evidence-based” applications. It has the
advantages of flexibility and scalability that the traditional relational database does not have. It
is very important especially in the distributed environment of massive semi-or non-structured
data applications. The advantage of having such data model can directly deal with semantic data
(machine understandable), but also support knowledge-based queries with reasoning function.
The data model takes into account of the design method and the aspects of the data model,
including the bibliographic framework, creators and contributors, classifications, seals, taboo term
and so on. The bibliographic framework consists of 3+2 model which stands for “Work- Instance-
Item”+“Annotation”+“Classification” based on the needs of evidence-based research of Chinese
ancient books, with the reference of the four-tier model of FRBR’s “WEMI” and three-tier model
of LOC’s BIBFRAME2.0. It can adapt flexibly to any kinds of ancient book catalogs and metadata
schema based on MARC or DCAP; it also can integrate the full texts of ancient literature. It
has an appropriate ability to represent the classification and its multiple comments of different
time periods in the records of ancient books. For the description of creators and contributors, the
BIBFRAME “Contribution” model is used to clarify the relationship between the responsibility and
the document, the relationship between the principle responsibility and the shared responsibility.
The knowledge of ancient books is structured into fine-grained semantic units in order to facilitate
the machine processing.

* Correspondence should be addressed to XIA Cuijuan, Email: cjxia@libnet.sh.cn, ORCID:0000-0002-1859-6979