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Terminology and Ontology for Cultural Heritage: Application to Chinese Ceramic Vessels Terminology and ontology for cultural heritage : application to chinese ceramic vessels Tong Wei To cite this version: Tong Wei. Terminology and ontology for cultural heritage : application to chinese ceramic vessels. Formal Languages and Automata Theory [cs.FL]. Université Grenoble Alpes [2020-..], 2020. English. NNT : 2020GRALM061. tel-03167916 HAL Id: tel-03167916 https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-03167916 Submitted on 12 Mar 2021 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. THÈSE Pour obtenir le grade de DOCTEUR DE L’UNIVERSITE GRENOBLE ALPES Spécialité : Informatique Arrêté ministériel : 25 mai 2016 Présentée par TONG WEI Thèse dirigée par Christophe ROCHE, Professeur, Université Savoie Mont-Blanc, et codirigée par Yangli Jia, Associate Professor, Université de Liaocheng (China) préparée au sein du Laboratoire LISTIC, équipe Condillac de l'École Doctorale Mathématiques, Sciences et Technologies de l'Information, Informatique Terminology and Ontology for Cultural Heritage: Application to Chinese Ceramic Vessels Thèse soutenue publiquement le 4 Décembre 2020, devant le jury composé de : Monsieur Christophe ROCHE Professeur, Université Savoie Mont-Blanc, Directeur de thèse Madame Sylvie DESPRES Professeur, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, Présidente, Rapporteur Madame Xiaomi AN Professor, Renmin University (Beijing, China), Rapporteur Madame Maria PAPADOPOULOU Chercheur associé, Université Savoie Mont-Blanc, Examinateur Madame Jing CHEN Associate Professor, Nanjing University (Nanjing, China), Examinateur ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisors, Professor Christophe Roche and Professor Yangli Jia. Without their support, this work would not have been possible. I will always be thankful to Professor Christophe Roche for introducing me to Terminology and showing me the way towards applied Ontology. He has continuously supported my Ph.D. work and guided my research as well as the write-up of the thesis. Without his guidance and constant feedback, I would not have achieved this work. His outstanding virtues - hard-working, modest, responsible, and knowledgeable - have and will always have a positive influence on my future scientific research and life. I would like to thank associate Professor Yangli Jia, who had encouraged me to go on to complete a Ph.D. degree, when I graduated with a Master’s degree and for providing help and guidance throughout the Ph.D. Whenever I had difficulty, he gave me useful advice. I thank him sincerely. I would like to acknowledge Dr. Maria Papadopoulou, who is a learned and responsible researcher. She gave me much guidance, especially in Digital Humanities, which helped improve my work. She helped me proofread, shared with me useful references and resources, and gave me advice on the thesis. I would like to express my sincere thanks for her help, guidance, and astuteness again. A special thanks to my colleague and friend Julien Roche. Fluent in Chinese, he has been a tremendous help with both daily life issues and scientific research. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, he was a constant help with administrative procedures. Without his generous support and help, it would not have been possible for me to study and live in France. I am grateful to the China Scholarship Council for providing funding for my research work. I also sincerely thank madame Sylvie Desprès, professor of the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, madame Xiaomi An, professor of the Renmin University of China, and madame Jing Chen, associate professor of Nanjing University, for reviewing my thesis and providing insightful comments. Finally, I would like to thank my family for supporting me throughout my Ph.D. work. Primarily, my wife, Gong Min. She not only is my spouse, but also an excellent collaborator. She supported my ideas and helped me take care of my parents, when they were sick. I thank her sincerely and wish us to be hand in hand forever. Abstract Cultural heritage is the legacy of physical artefacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that is inherited from past generations. Vases are among the most iconic objects of cultural heritage. In the context of this work, we have focused on Chinese ceramic vessels of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) and the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). There are many collections of vases in different museums in China. Although some of these collections have been digitized, they are rarely accessible in an open format and remain isolated. In addition, the lack of clearly identified terminologies is an obstacle to communication and knowledge sharing. Our work aims to respond to this issue by implementing practices drawn from the semantic web and knowledge engineering, and more particularly by building in a W3C format an ontology dedicated to the Chinese vases of the Ming and Qing dynasties. The construction of the TAO CI ("ceramic" in Chinese) ontology respects the experts' way of thinking in their conceptualization of the field, and takes into account the international standards in Terminology (ISO 1087 and ISO 704). Both approaches are based on the notion of essential characteristics and define a concept as a unique combination of characteristics. The search for differences between objects, combined with a morphological analysis of Chinese terms whose characters carry meaning in relation to knowledge of the field, allows identifying essential characteristics. The definition of concept is based on the idea that a concept is a set of essential characteristics stable enough to be named in language. We have thus proposed a specific method for building ontologies guided by the terms and essential characteristics of the domain. We have introduced new terms (neologisms) in English and concepts without any designation in language for ontology structuring purposes. The definition of terms in natural language follows the Aristotelian definition. It is based on the formal definition of concepts denoted by the terms. The construction of the ontology was done using Protégé, the most widely used environment for building ontologies in the W3C format (RDF/OWL). As the notion of essential characteristic does not exist in Description Logic, it was necessary to translate them. We have proposed some principles to this end. The terminological dimension was reduced, as is often the case, to annotations (in SKOS, RDFS) on the concepts. The TAO CI ontology is linked to external resources such as CIDOC CRM and ATT Getty for the conceptual part, and to museums for the objects. Finally, the TAO CI ontology was evaluated from the point of view of the domain (coverage) and its implementation. The ontology is in open access at the following address: http://www.dh.ketrc.com/otcontainer/data/OTContainer.owl The last phase of the project consisted in the creation of a dedicated website. This site provides access to the different resources of the project and, in particular, to a bilingual (English, Chinese) electronic dictionary of the vases of the Ming and Qing dynasties. The dictionary entries correspond to the OWL classes of the ontology: http://www.dh.ketrc.com/ The TAO CI ontology is, to our knowledge, the first open and reusable ontology in the format of the semantic web of Chinese ceramic vases. It is an illustration of an approach guided by terms and essential characteristics that can be applied to the construction of ontologies in other areas of Chinese cultural heritage. I KEYWORDS: terminology, ontology, ontoterminology, cultural heritage, digital humanities, semantic web, linked open data, e-dictionary, Chinese ceramic vessels. II TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... I PART I: INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................. 1 Motivation .............................................................................................................................................. 2 Issues ...................................................................................................................................................... 4 Naming and defining things for linking open data ................................................................................ 4 Terminological issues .......................................................................................................................... 4 Ontological issues ................................................................................................................................ 5 Cultural Heritage issues ....................................................................................................................... 5 Research questions ................................................................................................................................. 6 Objectives ..............................................................................................................................................
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