Linked Open Data and the Semantic Web

The Chinese Text Project Data Wiki (Instructions) contains large numbers of structured knowledge claims about historical entities and their relationships. This data can be downloaded in RDF format for data mining, exploration, and integration with other projects. The network of knowledge contained in the Wiki constitutes a knowledge graph, connecting entities to relevant data and identifiers pointing to data in other systems such as the China Biographical Database (CBDB), China Historical GIS (CHGIS), Academia Sinica's Person Authority Database, Dharma Drum's Open Content Project, Wikidata, and Wikipedia.

In the current implementation, data is exposed as RDF triples, using statements made up of properties and qualifiers in a similar structure to that used by Wikidata.

Uniform Resource Identifiers

URIs are used in Linked Open Data systems to uniquely identify entities (such as people, places, office titles, etc.). In addition to entity identifiers used within the Data Wiki (such as ctext:291374, which identifies the Song dynasty person Su Shi), every entity in the Data Wiki has a corresponding entity URI (such as https://data.ctext.org/entity/291374). This URI is visible at the bottom-right corner of each entity record page.

SPARQL query interface

An experimental query interface to the RDF data is available here: https://sparql.ctext.org/

Bulk download and license

Data is available in RDF either for individual entities, or for all entities in the Data Wiki. In both cases, the RDF data is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license. Please refer to the license itself for full details; in summary of the main terms:

• Attribution: when using this data, you must attribute the Chinese Text Project (https://ctext.org) as the source of the data. When reproducing any of this data online, you must maintain links from your records to the corresponding entity records in the Data Wiki.
• Non-commercial: you may not use this data for any commercial purposes. If you would like to use the data for commercial purposes, please contact us to discuss a commercial license.
• Share alike: if you remix, transform, or build upon this data, you must distribute your contributions under the same license.

Notes:

• The above license applies to the data in the bulk downloads below, and not to any other contents of the site except where explicitly stated.