Using Ontology to Organize Chinese Ancient Books in the Digital Age

ABSTRACT The digitization, curation, and utilization of Chinese ancient books are crucial to the digital humanities. Despite progress in these areas, issues with data interoperability, data sharing, and data linkage persist due to a lack of standardized annotated ancient corpus and a general description framework for ancient books. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes an ontology‐based description framework that integrates catalogs of Chinese ancient books from various institutions, creating a standardized, interpretable, and researchable knowledge base. The framework combines general standards with unique ancient book characteristics, revealing complex relationships between books and books, books and people, and books and times, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the knowledge contained within ancient books. Additionally, this paper applied the framework to The National Rare Ancient Book Directory , a catalog containing 13,026 books from over 400 institutes, to develop an interactive system. The system is available at https://rarebib.pkudh.org/ . Our results demonstrate that the framework standardizes data and provides a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the knowledge within ancient books. This has noteworthy implications for individuals engaged in research, scholarship, and reading in the digital age.