Integration of a Chinese character ontology and Historical Glyph Examples

Abstract

This report describes an attempt to integrate the “CHISE” (“Character Information Service Environment”) character ontology and the “HNG” (“Hanzi Normative Glyphs”) database

dataset. The CHISE character ontology is a large scale character ontology which includes 357 thousand character-objects including Unicode and non-Unicode characters and their glyphs, etc. It was developed for CHISE which is a character processing system not depended on character codes. The framework of CHISE is based on a graph storage named “CONCORD”. We developed a Web service to display and edit objects of CONCORD, called “EsT” (or “CHISE-wiki”). The CHISE character ontology uses the “Multiple Granularity Hanzi Structure Model” to support various glyphs and multiple unification granularity of Chinese characters. This model works fine for modern glyphs of Chinese characters. However, before we started the study to integrate CHISE and HNG, it was not clear that the model is sufficient for premodern Chinese characters. In addition, to design reasonable unification rules for each unification granularity, we need various glyph examples of Chinese characters. In these senses, the CHISE character ontology should integrate glyph database and/or glyph corpus. Therefore, we tried to integrate HNG and the CHISE character ontology. When viewed from the HNG side, this integration has the following significance. The original HNG web service has been stopped since the spring of 2015. Therefore, we applied research on the integration of CHISE and HNG, we provided HNG search function and data browsing function on the CHISE Web service.