= A System of Chinese Civilization in Time and Space (CCTS, http://gis.ascc.net/ccts/)

This is a part of the works conducted by the Institute of History and Phonology in cooperates with the Computing Center of Academia Sinica. The project directors are Dr. I-Chun Fan and Mr. Eric Yen.

Based on the requirements of multi-disciplinary research applications, the goal of this system is constructing an integrated GIS-based application infrastructure on the spatial extent of China, in the timeframe of Chinese history, and with the contents of Chinese civilization. Although target users of this system are primarily set to be scholars, academic experts, and schoolteachers, most general spatial-and temporal-based applications are also provided. A feedback mechanism was established for collecting research and application results continuously to fertilize contents and elaborate the value of information integration for our users.

This system consists of basic geospatial materials, WebGIS integrated application environment, and thematic information. The fundamental base maps come from Dr. Tan's "The Historical Atlas of China", which is composed of 8 volumes with 21 map groups that holds 307 maps, and covers 2000-year long Chinese historical features from the ancient time to Qing dynasty. All the maps were georeferenced with accuracy in 2 mm. Administrative boundaries and inhabited localities had been vectorized, other major themes are partially digitized based on research requirements. Furthermore, the distribution of cultural areas in pre-historical stage was incorporated and extends the temporal coverage to 7,000 BC. Millions of historical atlas and remote sensing imagery are persistently geo-referenced and overlaid into the system to broaden the spatial and temporal scope and for various applications. This system has the following features:

1.  A WebGIS-based distributed application infrastructure is constructed to provide both content navigation and Web mapping.

2.  Lower the cost for doing things in GIS way, and with shorter learning curve.

3.  Capable of integrating any geospatial and attribute information in the Internet.

4. Users could upload their results and contribute to the system, or just save to their local clients alternatively

5. Having scalability, integration and access control consideration into the design.

As an application example of this system, the systems of Scripta Sinica (漢籍電子文獻系統, It is a huge collection of digitized ancient Chinese books, over 400M Chinese characters at present.) and some catalogs of local gazetteers in Ming and Qing Dynasties has been integrated into CCTS. A diagram shows the system architecture of CCTS is shown in Figure 5. And, the information contents of CCTS are in Figure 6.

Figure 5: System Architecture of CCTS

Figure 6: Information Contents in CCTS

For illustration, while selecting any area from the WebGIS GUI, users would have a window listing all the place names within that area and each name could further link to the Scripta Sinica, Local Gazetteer Systems, Union Catalogs of University Libraries, and Database of Historical Notability. In Figure 7, that is an example of choosing the Kiangnan area and pop out 16 prefecture names, based on the map of Grain Price and population in 1820. Once the link of Suzhou to Scripta Sinica is clicked, and then users could define the query scope by marking the catalog of ancient books in the Scripta Sinica webpage. The lower two windows show the query results in book list and in context of some book.

  Figure 7: An illustration of integration of Text, Local Gazetteers and GIS

 Figure 8: Integration of Scripta Sinica in CCTS, Checking Maps in CCTS from Scripta Sinica

On the other hand, once the user of Scripta Sinica is checking context of some book, and like to know the footprint of some place name. Currently, there is a prototype providing a link button for user to get the map from CCTS, just like figure 8 the example showing豫州in三國. A more intelligent mechanism, which directly parses the context sentences to identify the terms of place name, is under construction.

Table-3 Websites of NDAP Available by 2002