Toward a Semantic Framework for Classical Chinese poetry: Multilingual and Decentralized Integration of East Asian Literary Heritage

Submitted by Huang Yanjie on 03/14/2026 - 06:51

Tracking #: 4048-5262

Authors: 
Huang Yanjie
Jiang Hui
Chen Tao
Sha Tianming

Responsible editor: 
Guest Editors 2025 OD+CH

Submission type: 
Full Paper
Abstract: 
Classical Chinese poetry, a classical form composed in literary Chinese, originated in China and spread across East Asia, including Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. It has played a key role in elite education, cultural diplomacy, and political communication. Despite its cultural significance, research on its semantic modeling remains limited, and digital representations often face issues like fragmentation and structural inconsistencies. This paper proposes a decentralized semantic infrastructure for Classical Chinese poetry as a multilingual resource for cultural heritage. The system is organized into three layers: (1) multilingual SKOS vocabularies to represent poetic concepts; (2) OWL ontologies that reuse BIBFRAME for bibliographic structure and FOAF for authorship representation; and (3) a distributed RDF resource layer supporting SPARQL 1.1 federated queries across poetic corpora. The infrastructure implements TEI standards for structuring poetic materials, including metadata and digitized text, while reserving interfaces for potential IIIF integration. Future work will focus on expanding multilingual vocabularies and integrating with cultural heritage platforms.
Full PDF Version: 
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Previous Version: 
Toward a Semantic Framework for Han Poetry: Multilingual and Decentralized Integration of East Asian Literary Heritage
Tags: 
Reviewed
Long-term Stable Link to Resources: 
https://github.com/TASYU78/Hanpoetry

Decision/Status: 
Accept

Solicited Reviews:
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Review #1
Anonymous submitted on 20/Mar/2026
Suggestion:
Minor Revision
Review Comment:

This manuscript is an updated version for the paper, even though the title has a little bit adjustment. The responses to the previous review comments are very impressive and in good quality.
Regarding the references, can you make sure that the one (47) has the ISO name included and this standard's number "ISO 7098:2015" (please check again and follow the normal way for citing ISO standards.

Review #2
By Cristiano Longo submitted on 31/Mar/2026
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

“Toward a Semantic Framework for Classical Chinese poetry: Multilingual and Decentralized Integration of East Asian Literary Heritage” proposes a semantic infrastructure for multilingual resources for cultural heritage strongly grounded on Linked Open Data and Semantic Web technologies. The infrastructure design is implemented to encode Chinese poetry texts of various types, ranging from ancient poems to English translations. Semantic web representations of literary texts is a hot topic for computer science researchers operating in the cultural heritage field. The proposed approach has some interesting aspects concerning the integration of SKOS with OWL and modeling themes and different semantics expressions can have. The paper is written in fluent English and is well structured. Technologically speaking, the implemented infrastructure follows the good practices of Linked Open Data. In addition, the design can be integrated and extended to cope with other collections and kinds of literary text.

For these reasons, I suggest this work for publication in the special issue.

Here follows some minor typo issues that could be fixed in the camera ready version.

Page 2. Add a space between “open data infrastructures.” and “Each level reflects”.
Page 5. Paragraphs (5) and (6) titles should be formatted as in the preceding ones.
Page 6. Add a space between “ instance-level resources.” and “For readability ”.
Page 16, 19, 20. Vertical spacing between some paragraphs differ from the rest of the paper. If it is not intentional, should be fixed.