Abstract
Abstract. The cultural heritage of the Buddhist grottoes on the Gansu section of the Silk Road in China has important historical, cultural and artistic values. In order to better protect these precious cultural sites including through facilitating ongoing assessment of their condition, the Dunhuang Academy has created a pilot inventory based on the Arches open-source software platform. This paper first briefly introduces the most important grottoes and the representative caves in Gansu province. It then, in view of the diversity of the grotto architecture layout, describes the Arches semantic graph data modelling technology and how the flexibility of Arches Designer was used to design the resource models, which not only meet data management needs, but also ensure data interoperability and longevity through incorporation of the CIDOC-CRM ontology. In addition, through design of the grottoes map plugin and resource components within Arches, the simple interaction and intuitive visualization of grottoes information was achieved. The Dunhuang Academy’s deployment of Arches will serve the need for grottoes data management and provide support for the establishment of a more scientific and effective protection and management system for the grottoes on the Silk Road in Gansu province. It is hoped that this project will demonstrate the suitability of the Arches platform to support the management of other grotto sites outside of Gansu province, as well as for heritage management elsewhere in China.
Highlights
Along the Gansu section of the Silk Road in China, there are 127 Buddhist grottoes, dating from the Sixteen Kingdoms to the Northern Wei, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and other dynasties
In order to meet the essential data management requirements of the grottoes in Gansu Province——we constructed several resource models based on the semantic graph data modelling technology and the Arches Designer tool
These models help realize the comprehensive management of the essential information of the grottoes, and realize the semantic modelling based on the CIDOC-Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), so that computers can automatically parse the data meaning, and facilitate data exchange and longevity
Summary
Along the Gansu section of the Silk Road in China, there are 127 Buddhist grottoes, dating from the Sixteen Kingdoms to the Northern Wei, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and other dynasties. Among these sites, there are World Heritage Sites such as Mogao Caves, Maijishan Grottoes and Bingling Cave-Temple, which are large in scale, exquisite in murals and sculptures, and relatively standardized in conservation and management. There are many small and medium-sized grottoes They have certain values, due to the remoteness of location and the smaller number of caves, they have not been effectively protected. Essential information about the location, quantity, content, heritage value, and conservation condition of grottoes in Gansu Province has been obtained
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