Using ISO and Semantic Web standard for building a multilingual terminology e-Dictionary: A use case of Chinese ceramic vases

Cultural heritage is the legacy of physical artefacts and intangible attributes of a group or society that is inherited from past generations. Terminology is a tool for the dissemination and communication of cultural heritage. The lack of clearly identified terminologies is an obstacle to communication and knowledge sharing. Especially, for experts with different languages, it is difficult to understand what the term refers to only through terms. Our work aims to respond to this issue by implementing practices drawn from the Semantic Web and ISO Terminology standards (ISO 704 and ISO 1087-1) and more particularly, by building in a W3C format ontology as knowledge infrastructure to construct a multilingual terminology e-Dictionary. The Chinese ceramic vases of the Ming and Qing dynasties are the application cases of our work. The method of building ontology is the ‘term-and-characteristic guided method’, which follows the ISO principles of Terminology. The main result of this work is an online terminology e-Dictionary. The terminology e-Dictionary could help archaeologists communicate and understand the concepts denoted by terms in different languages and provide a new perspective based on ontology for the digital protection of cultural heritage. The e-Dictionary was published at http://www.dh.ketrc.com/e-dictionary.html.