Overview |
Under the aegis of the National e-Learning and Digital Archives Program from 2002 to 2012, the Institute of History and Philology launched a project of the database of Qing official titles, which was to provide information including the different central and local offices and agencies and their specific titles in the Qing dynasty, as well as their duties, line-of-command, conventional names, ranks and many others. The Database of Qing Official Titles is divided into three interfaces: civil and military positions of the central government, civil and military positions in local governments, and timetables of official positions. The central and regional government interfaces are further subdivided according to yamen and positions at each level. As civil and military posts are broken down from the central government down to the regional, the database allows access to detailed information about each administrative office and position,--such as the respective superior institution, its name, rank, the period of time over which it existed, its responsibility, and development. The timetable of official positions shows the office holders and their lengths of terms in the Qing. This allows the user to locate and identify an official’s position in the hierarchy of the Qing bureaucracy, and further understand the organizational relationship between the bureaucratic system and particular offices. However, the current records of the Database are predicated on the traditional structure of web of documents; therefore, they are not able to process terms involving semantic relations. The objective of this project is to collaborate with ASCDC to convert the metadata records of the Database to the form of linked data and label them as Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). Once the conversion is complete, the data will be available on the LOD platform of ASCDC and free for sharing and further usage. |