Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
of EAD (Encoded Archival Description) [14], METS (Metadata Encoding &
Transmission Standard) [15] and MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema) [16].
MODS is bibliographic metadata to describe information about each material.
However, bibliographic attributes are not enough for collections: descriptions about
the origins of resources, histories of ownership and the relationships between other
resources are important information for collections. EAD is appropriate archival
metadata to describe such information. Materials themselves, their bibliographic data,
and their collection data must be linked together. METS is introduced to package
these metadata, functioning as an envelope to organize related metadata.
A retrieval example of the CIAS RSS is shown in Figure 4. In this example,
locations of the contents are indicated by marks on the map. If a mark is selected, its
information will be displayed.
(a) (b)
Fig. 4.
Retrieval Example of the CIAS Resource Sharing System. (a) is a map view to retrieve
records by locations, and (b) is an example of the retrieved record.
4 Spatial and Temporal Tools
Spatial tools and temporal tools are essential to area informatics to integrate,
visualize, and analyze data quantitatively and objectively. This chapter explains a
HuMap (a spatial tool) and HuTime (a temporal tool) that the H-GIS has developed.
4.1 A Spatial Information Tool (HuMap: Humanities Map)
HuMap is a newly developed free GIS tool that can handle objects on layers spanned
by the subject axis and the spatial axis (i.e., subject maps) in Figure 2. HuMap is
derived from TimeMap [17]. The innovation of TimeMap is that it can carry out
temporal operations, but weakness is that it is rather a viewer than an analysis tool.
The latest HuMap is completely different software from TimeMap: it can carry out
visualization operation, spatial operations and temporal operations. Functions of
HuMap are summarized as follows.
