HERU Ontology for Linking Chinese Classics Texts and its Commentaries

ABSTRACT Commentaries are derivative texts formed by commentators' interpretations of classics texts, which not only reflect the commentators' understanding and values in their era but also play an irreplaceable role in contemporary people's understanding of classics texts. At present, the literature in which commentaries are written collected by the library is organized in commentator‐centered and it is difficult to efficiently collect all the commentaries of the same classic texts and analyze the citations in the annotation texts. The development of Semantic Web technology has changed the way of knowledge representation and provided new ideas and methods for the organization and sharing of commentaries. We use the seven‐step method to design the HERU ontology. Finally, we conduct a semantic annotation experiment using some commentaries of the Analects of Confucius as an example to illustrate the practicality of the ontology in constructing annotation diachronic evolution and citation data. This study is of great significance to the inheritance and interpretation of Chinese classics and has reference significance for the semantic management between classic texts and their commentaries in other countries.