Bridging the gap between cultural heritage and research--a case study of the Chinese Genealogy Knowledge Service platform

The Chinese Genealogy Knowledge Service Platform,1 one of the Shanghai Library Knowledge Bases, aggregates genealogy data and links family names to resources in other libraries in China and beyond 2 . By extracting family names, social background, migration events from around 70,000 entries and developing an event ontology, more than 100,000 migration events spanning more than 3,000 years were identified. This project tells the story of the origins and development of families, using data which records significant migration and historical events in time and place. Using methodology from storytelling and Bakhtin (2001)’s theory of chronotope, our project places the narrative time-space continuum in the context of cultural heritage resources, using genealogy data to explore changes in family names using two main dimensions: chronological (temporal) and spatial.