Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Organized resources are compiled into “databases”. Database management
systems, information retrieval methods, and user interfaces are the main information
technologies in this phase. Databases are the basis of information processing, but in
Japan, numbers and sizes of databases especially for humanities are smaller than other
countries. The H-GIS has supported database creation to enrich humanities'
databases.
Most of the digital resources are distributed over databases. Researchers must
know locations of databases for a start, then access databases one by one, and retrieve
them by different methods. This is time consuming and tedious jobs. A “Resource
Sharing System (RSS)” is a new information system to integrate databases on the
Internet and to provide users with a uniform interface to retrieve databases seamlessly
in one operation [7, 8]. RSSs are the key technology to integrate digital resources.
Structures of RSSs will be explained in Chapter 3.
Each database encodes data by specific language, vocabularies, and terminologies
according to the discipline that the database depends on. Since a given word does not
always have the same meaning in different disciplines, RSSs alone are not enough to
retrieve data across disciplines. Dictionaries that organize words and their meanings
in a formalized structure are necessary to solve this problem. Using these dictionaries,
computers can automatically relate words according to their meanings (synonym,
antonym), hierarchical conceptions (taxonomy) and so on. Ontology is thought to be
the key technology in this phase, and RSSs together with “ontology dictionaries” are
expected to provide advanced data accessing methods. Some ontology tools
developed by the H-GIS will be mentioned in Chapter 5.
“Knowledge Creation” is the final phase of the model. All data are visualized,
integrated, classified, compared, and analyzed to discover and/or create new
knowledge about particular areas. Spatiotemporal attributes are crucial in this phase,
and spatiotemporal information tools, geo-statistics, and data mining techniques are
key technologies to process these attributes. New knowledge created in this phase is
fed back to the fields, and a new research process will begin. Spatiotemporal tools
developed by the H-GIS will be explained in Chapter 4.
All information concepts and technologies indicated here are necessary for area
studies, but the following chapters will focus on RSSs, spatiotemporal informatics,
and ontology.
2.2 Data Model of Area Studies
When resources are applied to computer processing, their data must be comparable,
that is, they must be quantitative values, ordered values or at least symbols clearly
distinguishable from others. Typical resources related to area studies are topics,
magazines, papers, documents, maps etc. These resources have bibliographic
attributes such as subjects, creators, titles, contributors that can be used to identify and
find resources. Unfortunately, most of the bibliographic attributes are ambiguous and
difficult to quantify, but time and place are a few quantitative attributes that are
relatively easy to be identified from bibliographic attributes. Moreover, there are also
many other resources whose bibliographic attributes are difficult to identify. Nontext
materials such as archaeological remains, excavations, and natural phenomena are
typical examples. For these resources, times and places (when and where a resource
