Research On Historical Documents About Safeguarding Sovereignty Of South China Sea Based On Linked Data

With the sovereignty issues over the South China Sea continuing to be aggravated in recent years, the claimant countries compete to present sovereignty over the South China Sea with evidence, such as historical materials or materials related with international law. All of this is a severe challenge for China's claim of sovereignty. A large number of historical documents at home and abroad are recorded in China's sovereignty over the South China Sea, including all kinds of evidence according with the requirements of the International Court of Justice. Obtaining valuable evidence from the relevant historical documents, realizing the relevance of the documents, integrating documents to constitute a strong evidence chain of documents, which have important significance for safeguarding the sovereignty of the South China Sea.The construction of the evidence chain of documents about South China Sea involves many types of resources, such as documents resources, concept resources, author resources and organization resources. At present, the construction of the evidence chain of documents about South China Sea is still done manually, just as the period of paper documents. In the face of a large number of distributed and heterogeneous resources, it is difficult and inefficient to find out the potential relevance to construct the evidence chain manually.In order to solve the problem of the distributed and heterogeneous resources in the construction of the evidence chain of documents about South China Sea, in this paper, it constructs a supporting-service framework model by the use of related technologies of Semantic Web. After a brief overview of Semantic Web, its core technology (eXtended Markup Language, Resource Description Framework and Ontology) and Linked Data, it gives a further discussion of the function and application method about Linked Data and Ontology in the construction of the evidence chain of documents about South China Sea. Based on this, a three-layer framework model is proposed to provide supporting services to the construction of the evidence chain of documents about South China Sea.The first layer of the supporting-service framework model is to construct a ontology model of the various types of resources about South China Sea issue based on the hybrid ontology method. Ontology model is a specification of semantic description for all kinds of resources about South China Sea issue. The documents' core metadata ontology and the South China Sea issue ontology are important parts of the hybrid ontology. Documents' core metadata ontology can solve the structural differences between different types of documents metadata description, and achieve the semantic fusion of different documents' metadata. It can achieve the semantic links from different types of documents and interoperability. The South China Sea issue ontology is constructed through the analysis of the concept of the South China Sea issue, and this paper describes the concepts and the relationship between concepts by SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) description language. Author ontology and organization ontology are constructed by the existing ontology.The second layer of the supporting-service framework model is to achieve the integration of different types of resources based on Linked Data. Using the documents' core metadata ontology to give a semantic description of the documents resources, it turns the documents resources into semantic data with unique URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). The resources about South China Sea issue are described to the semantic RDF data by the South China Sea issue ontology. Then it transforms other types of resources (such as author, organization etc.) into the same RDF format by the corresponding ontology. So it achieves the relevance and expansion between the documents resources and other types of by the RDF links on resources, it turns the existing resources into a set of complete evidence fusion, and also it makes the existing resources linked with external resources by RDF links.The third layer of the supporting-service framework model is to apply linked data of resources in the construction of the evidence chain of documents about South China Sea. Firstly, because of linked data with semantic information, so when searching resources about some concepts, user can obtain all resources about all relevant concepts including upper concept, lower concepts, synonymous concepts and so on. It helps the deep mining of evidence. Secondly, the linked data with semantic information presents the structure of domain knowledge, so it is good for the knowledge reorganization of evidence. Finally, it is easy to link the published linked data with other data sets seamlessly, so it helps obtain new sources of evidence on the basis of existing evidence.In this paper, the semantic description and integration of various types of resources is achieved by the hybrid ontology, the relevance and fusion between documents resources and other resources is achieved based on the published linked data. The expected achievements of this paper are as follows. Firstly, it achieves the fusion and semantic interoperability of the distributed and heterogeneous resources. Secondly, it helps to organize different types of resources orderly as a whole by the semantic links. Lastly, the constructed model provides supporting services to the evidence chain of documents about South China Sea, such as searching, browsing and evidence discovery.The supporting service are achieved by the constructed three-layer framework model, a detailed description of the role played by the Linked Data has been introduced, and there is also an example to show the advantage of Linked Data in the construction of the evidence chain of documents about South China Sea. Finally, it turns out that the model constructed in this paper has certain significance in the completion of the evidence chain of documents about South China Sea, and it helps to safeguard the sovereignty of South China Sea.