Buddhist Digital Library – Contents, Standards and Functions
Aming Tu The Chung Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies
aming@chibs.edu.tw

Supporting Spatio-Temporal Retrieval in a Rare-Book Digital Library
Ming Zhang, Dongqing Yang, Zhihong Deng, Shiwei Tang, Peking University, Beijing
tsw@db.pku.edu.cn

A Proposal to Build a Philosophy Knowledge Portal based on Topic Maps
Byoung-il Choi, Institute of Philosophy, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea
tarski@snu.ac.kr

Abstracts

Buddhist Digital Library -- Contents, Standards and Functions
Aming Tu, Head of the Library and Information Center, The Chung Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies
aming@chibs.edu.tw
The purpose of this report is to introduce the study and creation of the Buddhist Digital Library. This Library contains a large amount of digital Contents in the area of study, which is based on the IT Standards for the purpose of sharing the data and creating the academic user Functions.

The challenge of digitizing the Buddhist canonical scriptures has to be seen in the larger context of the communication revolution we are experiencing. As our understanding of what a text is slowly changing with the advent of digital text. For the time being the Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (CBETA) and the Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies (CHIBS) have developed a new environment for this Buddhist Digital Texts, known as Buddhist e-Library will be introduced at this Session.

Hence, this report will try to present the collections of the digital material related to the study of Buddhism, and the analyzing of the development of Buddhist texts, the process of the digitalization of the available material, as following:

1. Introduction
2. Buddhist Tripitaka and the IT Contents, Standards, and Functions.
3. Contents of the Buddhist Texts -- the Buddhist Sutras and the Buddhist Articles.
4. Standards applied in this digital library, such as DC15, XML/TEI etc.
5. Functions of this Buddhist digital library in using the methods of Citations, Academic writing formats etc.
6. Creating the Knowledge Structure and Knowledge Base in using the method of Term Clustering and the ideas of Semantics Web, Ontology etc.

At the same time, the newly finished Digital Buddhism documents -- mainly focus on the digital material published and released by CBETA and CHIBS will be introduced. This section concentrates on the digitalizing process of the Buddhist Texts -- the digital full text with XML/TEI (Text Encoding Interchange) Markup and cataloging the entries with Dublin Core will be presented.

In order to help researchers of humanities study the cultural ancient resources from temporal and geographical perspectives, we build WebGIS-RBDL at Peking University. In WebGIS-RBDL, metadata records and historical map layers are linked together, and therefore users can get more spatio-temporal information about rare books through folded map layers, including historical maps, modern maps and landform images. In this paper, the architecture of WebGIS-RBDL is introduced. Then, the principles, rules and methods for metadata extracting and correlating in WebGIS-RBDL are discussed. Furthermore, efficient tools to extract spatio-temporal information automatically from rare-book metadata are developed. The WebGIS-RBDL can be extended to include other ancient collections easily. Our efforts show that using GIS in digital libraries is a new and promising method to build more effective user-friendly interfaces in digital libraries. In order to help researchers of humanities study the cultural ancient resources from temporal and geographical perspectives, we build WebGIS-RBDL (http://db.pku.edu.cn/website/rub2/viewer.htm) at Peking University. In WebGIS-RBDL, metadata records and historical map layers are linked together, therefore users can get more Spatio-Temporal information about rare books through folded map layers, including historical maps, modern maps and landform images.
The WebGIS-RBDL applies the three-tier software architecture: the back-end is the Data Service layer; the middle is the Application layer; the front is the Web Browser layer. The Data Service layer supports accesses to data repositories. Data in the repositories can be non-structured images, map layer files, semi-structured XML files and structured metadata. The Application layer includes the Web information service and the WebGIS service. The Application layer returns processed results to the Web browser according to query requirements from the front Web browser and data from the back-end data repositories. The Web Browser layer provides the WebGIS interface and the OAI-PMH metadata interface.
It is very important to get guiding rules for metadata extraction. Researches on Chinese rare books (e.g. rubbings) have very distinct characteristics, one of which is that it abounds in historical names and dynasty titles such as “the place of being excavated”, “the place of preservation”, “Spatio-Temporal range”, etc. We should think about automatic extraction of historical places and ages from inscriptions. We set up the historical gazetteer and the dynasty thesaurus to help us extract the ‘Spatio-Temporal’ metadata. An efficient tool to extract Spatio-Temporal information automatically from rare book metadata is developed.
The WebGIS-RBDL can be extended to include other ancient collections easily. Our effort shows that using GIS in digital libraries is a new and promising method to build more effective user-friendly interfaces in digital libraries.

Ontology is a core component of the Semantic Web and knowledge-based systems. But it is difficult to find a useful ontology in actual domains. In order to build useful domain ontology, conceptualization of the domain knowledge by knowledge experts of the specific domain and specification of conceptualized knowledge with formal languages by ontology designers are required. In addition, structured and detailed guidelines and methods should be provided to be shared between development team members. We build a useful academic ontology that is based on the conceptual knowledge structure in the domain of philosophy, and propose a detailed methodology to build a text ontology based on Topic Maps. Our methodology consists of two phases, ontology modeling and ontology implementation. We implement a philosophy knowledge portal, Philosophy Knowledge Map, to support retrieving and navigating of the philosophy knowledge and propose an efficient framework to manage a very large ontology based on distributed components.

Keyword: Ontology building methodology, Philosophy ontology, Topic Maps