WebGIS approach of entity-oriented search to visualize historical and cultural events

Abstract

The chronological biography or ‘Nianpu’ is a special style of Chinese historical writing formed by a person’s life events in time order. It provides significant records for the research of historical events. However, from syntactic collation, structural, and semantic aspects, the heterogeneousness of Nianpu materials caused the lack of systematical information collation, which could hinder the research of historical events. The article presents a semantic WebGIS platform based on an entity-oriented search and visualization system to reorganize unstructured information. It delivers: (1) a Chinese historical event database to store and manage Chinese historical information derived from the chronological biography; (2) an ontology to integrate different historical datasets; and (3) a web geographic information system to visualize and analyze information of historical events. This platform achieves the reorganization of historical event information at spatial and temporal levels by the Web. It enables humanities researchers to explore the relationships of historical entities and their evolution visually and interactively. The platform is available at https://nianpu.pkudh.org/.

Digital humanities: Mission accomplished? An analysis of scholarly literature

“…First of all, the mentioned predominance of textual analysis among the research subjects has now reduced. For example, audio and visual data, cinema, music, dance, the production and study of born-digital content and computer games, biometry, geography, cartography and geographic information systems have become part of DH (Zeng et al, 2022; Dibeltulo et al, 2020; Hong and Wu, 2022; Escobar Varela and Hernández-Barraza, 2020; Bailey-Ross et al, 2017; Salah et al, 2021; Wei et al, 2022). Even recently, however, some privilege is reserved for text: Frabetti (2012) notes that DH is generally considered to embrace all the activities that draw their methods from computer science, such as image processing, data visualization and network analysis, ‘to produce new ways of understanding and approaching humanities texts ’.…”

3D WebGIS for Ephemeral Architecture Documentation and Studies in the Humanities

“…A WebGIS is used not only for data archiving, visualization, queries, and downloads but also for generating analysis maps-such as density maps and statistical data-allowing the retrieval of, for instance, the distribution of historical images for the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway [28]. Relationships between historical events, their locations, and people can be observed over time, such as the influence played by an important Chinese politician across China [29] or the Australian places visited by the explorer Sir Joh Forrest over the 19th century [30]. In [31], a WebGIS was applied to research the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, connecting religious sites with archival and historical sources.…”

“…As demonstrated in these studies, WebGIS applications enable experts in the humanities and non-information and communication technologies (ICT)-and non-GIS experts in general-to integrate information and explore relationships hidden in various documents that, without the use of a WebGIS, would remain difficult to discover. Structuring a WebGIS platform helps researchers reduce the complexity of querying numerous data, spatializing them, referring them to a specific time, and saving time for experts [29]. Unfortunately, these studies are limited in different ways.…”

“…In general, people experience places from the human point of view and in a 3D visualization, and not using 2D representations from a bird's-eye view. In almost all the studies here considered, a WebGIS is solely conceived as 2D, missing an opportunity to make historical places more understandable to everyone [21,28,29]. Ontologies and cataloging standards for historical documents and architectures are rarely adopted and declared; good examples are the study conducted by Wei [29] for ontologies' applications in relating people, events, places, and time-and the Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale (ISPRA) geoportal-regarding the application of cataloging standards to maps.…”

“…In almost all the studies here considered, a WebGIS is solely conceived as 2D, missing an opportunity to make historical places more understandable to everyone [21,28,29]. Ontologies and cataloging standards for historical documents and architectures are rarely adopted and declared; good examples are the study conducted by Wei [29] for ontologies' applications in relating people, events, places, and time-and the Istituto Superiore per la Protezione e la Ricerca Ambientale (ISPRA) geoportal-regarding the application of cataloging standards to maps. Relationships are not always considered, missing an opportunity to expand knowledge; a good example is provided by [28].…”