Our paper in PNAS

is finally in print!

It was a long road. Thank you to the ICHD team of Grace Fong (McGill), Michael Fuller (UC Irvine), and Peter Bol and Lex Berman (Harvard). Thanks also to Jimmy Li and Jin Xing for making this a reality.

Renee E. Sieber, Christopher C. Wellen, and Yuan Jin. 2011. Spatial cyberinfrastructures, ontologies, and the humanities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(14): 5504-5509.

Abstract: We report on research into building a cyberinfrastructure for Chinese biographical and geographic data. Our cyberinfrastructure contains (i) the McGill-Harvard-Yenching Library Ming Qing Wom- en’s Writings database (MQWW), the only online database on historical Chinese women’s writings, (ii) the China Biographical Database, the authority for Chinese historical people, and (iii) the China Historical Geographical Information System, one of the first historical geographic information systems. Key to this inte- gration is that linked databases retain separate identities as bases of knowledge, while they possess sufficient semantic interopera- bility to allow for multidatabase concepts and to support cross- database queries on an ad hoc basis. Computational ontologies create underlying semantics for database access. This paper fo- cuses on the spatial component in a humanities cyberinfrastruc- ture, which includes issues of conflicting data, heterogeneous data models, disambiguation, and geographic scale. First, we describe the methodology for integrating the databases. Then we detail the system architecture, which includes a tier of ontologies and schema. We describe the user interface and applications that allow for cross-database queries. For instance, users should be able to analyze the data, examine hypotheses on spatial and temporal relationships, and generate historical maps with datasets from MQWW for research, teaching, and publication on Chinese women writers, their familial relations, publishing venues, and the literary and social communities. Last, we discuss the social side of cyber- infrastructure development, as people are considered to be as critical as the technical components for its success.