The Semantic Architecture for Chinese Cultural Celebrities’ Manuscript Library

Abstract

Semantic architecture is crucial for a digital library application especially in a distributed system environment. It provides various approaches to overcome semantic interoperability problems and usually consists of metadata solution with open system architecture. The design of the digital library system for the China Cultural Celebrities’ Manuscripts Library (CCCML), which is a branch of Shanghai Library, has taken into account a lot of the main aspects from the requirement of semantics, including the metadata profiles, encoding consistence, authority control, ontology functioning, semantic integration, etc. We argue that it is very important to establish an articulated layered semantic architecture for digital libraries in the semantic web environment. And it becomes more and more clear that the semantic services can be settled with the Semantic Web Services technologies, which is supported by and consisted of a wide range of standards and protocols. And a lot of mainstream interoperability architecture, such as OAI, OpenURL etc., can be conformed or implemented by Semantic Web Services. This paper gives some major considerations and overviews on the design of semantic architecture for CCCML, which shows a lot of similarity in typical digital library systems.