Spatial cyberinfrastructures, ontologies, and the humanities

Abstract

We report on research into building a cyberinfrastructure for Chinese biographical and geographic data. Our cyberinfrastructure contains (i) the McGill-Harvard-Yenching Library Ming Qing Women's Writings database (MQWW), the only online database on historical Chinese women's writings, (ii) the China Biographical Database, the authority for Chinese historical people, and (iii) the China Historical Geographical Information System, one of the first historical geographic information systems. Key to this integration is that linked databases retain separate identities as bases of knowledge, while they possess sufficient semantic interoperability to allow for multidatabase concepts and to support cross-database queries on an ad hoc basis. Computational ontologies create underlying semantics for database access. This paper focuses on the spatial component in a humanities cyberinfrastructure, which includes issues of conflicting data, heterogeneous data models, disambiguation, and geographic scale. First, we describe the methodology for integrating the databases. Then we detail the system architecture, which includes a tier of ontologies and schema. We describe the user interface and applications that allow for cross-database queries. For instance, users should be able to analyze the data, examine hypotheses on spatial and temporal relationships, and generate historical maps with datasets from MQWW for research, teaching, and publication on Chinese women writers, their familial relations, publishing venues, and the literary and social communities. Last, we discuss the social side of cyberinfrastructure development, as people are considered to be as critical as the technical components for its success.