# An Ontology of Chinese Ceramic Vases

Tong Wei, Christophe Roche, Maria Papadopoulou, Yangli Jia

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Tong Wei, Christophe Roche, Maria Papadopoulou, Yangli Jia. An Ontology of Chinese Ceramic Vases. 12th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development, Nov 2020, Budapest, France. pp.53-63, 10.5220/0010110600530063. hal-03134730

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<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>
An Ontology of Chinese Ceramic Vases

Tong Wei¹,², Christophe Roche¹,², Maria Papadopoulou¹,² and Yangli Jia²

¹Condillac Research Group of LISTIC Lab, University Savoie Mont-Blanc, Rue du Lac Majeur, Le Bourget du Lac, France

²The School of Computer Science, Liaocheng University, HuNan Road 1, Liaocheng City, China

**Keywords:** Cultural Heritage, Ontology, Ontology Building, Semantic Web, Chinese Ceramic Vases.

**Abstract:** Extensive collections of Chinese ceramic vases are housed in museums throughout China. They could serve as rich sources of data for historical research. Although some data sources have been digitized, the vision of heritage institutions is not only to display objects and simple descriptions (drawn from metadata) but also to allow for understanding relationships between objects (created by semantically interrelated metadata). The key to achieving this goal is to utilize the technologies of the Semantic Web, whose core is Ontology. The focus of this paper is to describe the construction of the TAO CI ("ceramics" in Chinese) ontology of the domain of ceramic vases of the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. The theoretical and methodological approach adopted to construct the TAO CI ontology is term-and-characteristic guided, i.e., it relies on a morphological analysis of the Chinese terms used in the domain, and respects the ISO principles on Terminology (ISO 1087 and 704), according to which concepts are defined by means of essential characteristics. The research presented in this article aims to publish the resulting structured data on the Semantic Web for the use of anybody interested, including museums hosting collections of these vessels, and to enrich existing methodologies on domain ontology building. To our knowledge, there are no comprehensive ontologies for Chinese ceramic vases. TAO CI ontology remedies this gap and provides a reference for ontology building in other domains of Chinese cultural heritage. The tool used is Protégé. The TAO CI ontology is open access here: http://www.dh.ketrc.com/otcontainer/data/OTContainer.owl.

# 1 INTRODUCTION

China has a rich cultural heritage and has concentrated on producing digital data under the first wave of digitization. This is also true of the knowledge domain of Chinese ceramic vessels. The domain of Chinese ceramic vessels is rich, yet it lacks knowledge representation models (ontologies) to capture Chinese pottery concepts, express them in Semantic Web compatible interchange formats, and make them shareable and linkable to other data. As there is no ontology in the domain of Chinese ceramics providing the semantics of relevant data, most heritage institutions in China have not yet published cultural heritage data on the Semantic Web. Furthermore, every institution accumulates its data in its own traditional database system rather than linking

data through an open data policy. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes the TAO CI ("ceramics" in Chinese) ontology. In compliance to the ethos of reuse recommended by the W3C, the TAO CI ontology relates to existing ontologies and thesauri, such as CIDOC CRM (Cidoc, 2003), EDM (Doerr et al., 2010), and AAT (Soergel, 1995). First, the TAO CI ontology aims to provide an important reference for the publication of other cultural heritage ontologies and to be conducive to more and more Chinese heritage institutions publishing open cultural heritage data and linking them. Second, the theoretical and methodological approach adopted in the construction of the TAO CI ontology is term-and-characteristic guided, i.e. it adopts the ISO principles on Terminology (ISO 1087 and 704), which define concepts on the basis of their essential characteristics for defining concepts. Last but not least, this work

a https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4159-6248

b https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0756-0559

c https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6451-8712

d https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6849-1059
aims at enriching existing methodologies of building
domain ontologies and suggests that taking into
account a term-and-characteristic guided approach,
makes ontology engineering less dependent on formal
languages and description logics as required
background.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows:
Section 2 describes the domain, section 3 introduces
the objectives, section 4 is dedicated to the state of the
art. Section 5 is the main section dedicated to our
contribution to ontology building methodology
relying on a morphological analysis of Chinese terms
and on the ISO principles on Terminology. Section 6
presents the TAO CI ontology in Protégé, and the last
section presents the evaluation of the TAO CI
ontology.

2 DOMAIN OF RESEARCH

2.1 Ming and Qing Dynasties

Chinese history goes back about 5,000 years. Chinese
ceramic vessels are among the most iconic objects of
Chinese cultural heritage. Changes in pottery styles
reflect the change in dynasties. In this paper, the focus
is on Chinese porcelain vases defined as "clay vessels
fired at high temperature used for decoration" of the
Ming and Qing dynasties (冯先铭, 2002).

Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) ceramics were
famous for the boldness of their form and decoration
and the varieties of design.<fnref n="5" /> Already from the time of
the Tang dynasty and the Song dynasty, there were
many famous kilns and many different types of
ceramic vessels. From the beginning of the Ming
dynasty, the Jingdezhen kiln gradually became the
most important production place: ceramic vessels of
the Jingdezhen kiln represented the highest quality at
the time. Between 1350 and 1750, Jingdezhen was a
center of production for nearly all of the world's
porcelain.

Qing dynasty (1644-1911) porcelain was famous
for its polychrome decorations, delicately painted
landscapes, and bird and flower as well as
multicolored enamel designs. The peak of Chinese
ceramics production took place in the reigns of
Kangxi (1661-1722), Yongzheng (1722-1735), and
Qianlong (1735-1796) during which improvement

was seen in almost all ceramic types, including the
blue and white wares, polychrome wares,
monochrome wares, etc.<fnref n="6" /> During the Qing dynasty,
potters began using bright colors to adorn plates and
vases with meticulously painted scenes.

2.2 Collection of Vases

The first step of our work was to select the set of vases
to study. The set had to be enough representative of
the richness of the domain without being too big since
the main and first goal was defining the ontology
rather than populating it. In China, many museums
publish much information about ceramic vessels on
their websites. One hundred forty-nine objects were
selected from different museums in China. Ninety-
seven objects come from the Palace Museum<fnref n="7" /> that
has the most important collection of ceramics.
Twenty-two objects come from the National Museum
of China<fnref n="8" />, twenty-four objects from the Guangdong
Museum<fnref n="9" />. Four objects come from the Shanghai
Museum<fnref n="10" /> and two objects from the Capital
Museum<fnref n="11" />. For the selection of objects, we have
adopted the following three criteria. The two first
concern the selection of the museum, which had to
fulfil the following conditions: first, the collection of
ceramics had to be recognized as a reference in
ceramic vessels in China; second, the information
about the collection should be publicly available and
precise enough for the building of an ontology. The
third principle was to select objects as different as
possible, i.e., of different types according to their
shape, the technique of making, decoration, etc.

3 OBJECTIVES

The TAO ontology has two aims. The first one is to
build a knowledge representation of Chinese ceramic
of the Ming and Qing dynasties in the form of an open
ontology. The second one is to provide a bilingual
(Chinese-English) e-dictionary of ceramics vases.
The competency questions (Ren et al., 2014) that
were used to specify the requirements of the ontology
are shown in Table 1.

<footnote n="5">⁵ http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat7/sub40/item258.html
chapter-11</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ https://www.comuseum.com/ceramics/qing/</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ https://www.dpm.org.cn/Home.html</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ http://www.chnmuseum.cn/</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ http://www.gdmuseum.com/</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ https://www.shanghaimuseum.net/museum frontend/</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ http://www.capitalmuseum.org.cn/</footnote>
4 STATE OF THE ART

The state of the art presented here features work done
in an effort to produce interoperable vocabularies for
the expression of Cultural Heritage data. It includes
W3C languages, semantic data models, thesaurus and
ontology resources, and ontology building
methodologies.

Opening cultural heritage on the web relies on W3C standards such as OWL <fnref n="12" /> (Web Ontology Language), a Semantic Web language designed to represent rich and complex knowledge about things, groups of things, and relations between things, SKOS<fnref n="13" /> (Simple Knowledge Organization System), a data model for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems on the Web. SKOS can be used to capture much of the semantics of existing thesaurus of museums and other memory institutions thesauri. Let us also quote DC (Dublin Core), a metadata schema based on 15 essential properties to describe online and physical resources<fnref n="14" />.

Semantic Data Models for the Cultural Heritage
domain have to be taken into account. In particular,
CIDOC-CRM, a meta-ontology for the representation
of concepts for the use of museum and cultural
heritage specialists (Cidoc, 2003). It provides a
semantic framework to building a mapping between
different cultural heritage resources reducing their
heterogeneity (Doerr, 2003). Our work not only aims
to build an ontology for museum publishing open
museum data, but also aims to build a multilingual
terminological knowledge base. From a
terminological point of view, we need to build a more
‘granular’ ontology for knowledge representation of
Chinese ceramic vases. Let us also quote EDM, the
common data model that was built in order to
harmonize data from different providers of
Europeana (Doerr et al., 2010). It is used for the
representation of concepts in the cultural heritage
domain. It is not a fixed schema that dictates the way
of representing data, but rather a conceptual
framework (or ontology) to which more specific
models can be attached, and interoperability between
them enhanced.

As far as ontological resources that the TAO CI
project can benefit, let us quote AAT (The Art &
Architecture Thesaurus), a structured resource that
can be used to improve access to information about

art, architecture, and other material culture through
rich metadata and links, hoping to provide (along with
other Getty vocabularies) a powerful conduit for
research and discovery in digital art history and
related disciplines <fnref n="15" /> (Soergel, 1995). The AAT
comprises over 250,000 terms on architectural
history, styles, and techniques. Our ontology has been
linked with AAT in order to provide more
information for our terms in the ontology.
Kerameikos<fnref n="16" /> is a “collaborative project dedicated to
defining the intellectual concepts of pottery following
the tenets of linked open data and the formulation of
an ontology for representing and sharing ceramic data
across disparate data systems.” (Gruber & Smith,
2014). Let us also quote Ontoceramic, which is an
OWL ontology for ceramics classification (Cantone
et al., 2015). Lekythos<fnref n="17" /> is an another project that
aims at representing concepts in the domain of
ancient Greek pottery, but having natural language
terms in the domain as its starting point.

According to (Ushold, 1998), “An [explicit]
ontology may take a variety of forms, but necessarily
it will include a vocabulary of terms and some
specification of their meaning (i.e., definitions).” For
domain experts, identifying and defining concepts in
ontology also presents a challenge for which ontology
building methodology can bring useful aids.
Ontology building methods can be based on objective
criteria, e.g., clarity, coherence, extensibility, etc.
(Gruber, 1995), software engineering methods
(Fernández-López, 1999), text-based construction
(Zouaq & Nkambou, 2009), modular design approach
(Ozacar et al., 2011), ontological engineering
(Suárez-Figueroa et al., 2012), unsupervised domain
ontology learning method (Venu et al., 2016), based
on Formal Concept Analysis (Nong et al., 2019), etc.
Let us quote some methodologies focusing on the
stages which compose them. METHONTOLOGY
(Fernández-López et al., 1997) includes seven
stages: specification, knowledge acquisition,
conceptualization, integration, implementation,
evaluation, and documentation. On-To-Knowledge
Methodology (Sure et al., 2004) includes the
following phases: feasibility study, kick-off,
refinement, evaluation, and application & evolution.

NeOn methodology (Suárez-Figueroa et al., 2015)
provides nine scenarios for developing ontologies.

<footnote n="12">¹² https://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-features-20040210/</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ https://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/#notes</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ https://dublincore.org/schemas/ Schemas are machine-
processable specifications that define the structure and syntax
of metadata specifications in a formal schema language</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/aat/
about.html</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ http://kerameikos.org/</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ http://o4dh.com/lekythos</footnote>
<table><caption>Table 1: The competency questions.</caption><thead><tr><td>CQ</td><td>Competency Question</td><td>Class</td><td>Relation</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1</td><td>What are the different types of vase?</td><td>Vase</td><td>vase-type is-a Vase</td></tr><tr><td>2</td><td>What material is vase the made of?</td><td>Vase, material</td><td>Vase is made of Material</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>What is the color and glaze of the vase?</td><td>Vase, Glaze-color,</td><td>Vase glaze-color is</td></tr><tr><td>4</td><td>Which dynasty is the vase?</td><td>Vase, Dynasty</td><td>Vase hasDynasty Dynasty</td></tr><tr><td>5</td><td>Which emperor is the vase?</td><td>Vase, Emperor</td><td>Vase hasEmperor Emperor</td></tr><tr><td>6</td><td>What are the Chinese and English terms of the vases</td><td>Vase</td><td>Vase label string</td></tr><tr><td>7</td><td>What are the components of the vase?</td><td>Vase, Component</td><td>Vase hasComponent Component</td></tr><tr><td>8</td><td>What is the function of the vase?</td><td>Vessel, Function</td><td>Vessel hasFunction Function</td></tr><tr><td>9</td><td>Which dynasty does the emperor belong to?</td><td>Emperor, Dynasty</td><td>Emperor belongTo dynasty</td></tr><tr><td>10</td><td>Where is the vase x collected in?</td><td>Vase x</td><td>Vase x is Collected In string</td></tr><tr><td>11</td><td>Which kiln is the vase x produced?</td><td>Vase x</td><td>Vase x is produced in string</td></tr><tr><td>12</td><td>What is vase x decorated with?</td><td>Vase x</td><td>Vase x is decorated by string</td></tr><tr><td>13</td><td>What is the image of vase x?</td><td>Vase x</td><td>Vase x image string</td></tr></tbody></table>

# 5 TAO CI METHODOLOGY

Ontology building follows a lifecycle made up of several stages (Fernández-López et al., 1997). Some of them have to be specialized, and others have to be introduced to take into account the specificities of the domain. The theory of concept underpinning the ontology can also strongly impact the building methodology. Following the ISO principles on Terminology where “a term is a verbal designation of a concept” and “a concept is a unique combination of (essential) characteristics<fnref n="18" />” (ISO 1087, ISO 704), we were led to adopt a “term-and-characteristic” guided methodology derived from works carried out in Digital Humanities (Roche & Papadopoulou, 2019). Identifying essential characteristics becomes the main goal to achieve.

The problem of identifying essential characteristics, is a new and central phase of our methodology. This phase is aimed both at identifying differences between objects (vases with neck *versus* vases without neck) and on a morphological analysis of Chinese terms whose characters carry meaning in relation to the denoted objects, e.g. the term "清德化窑白釉堆雕花卉瓷碗" where the first character (清) which represents the Qing dynasty and the last one the type of vase (碗).

The term-and-characteristic guided methodology includes seven steps. Each of them aims at different tasks: step 1: identify the scope of the domain and the objectives, step 2: identify terms and objects, step 3: identify essential characteristics, step 4: define concepts, step 5: build ontology using one of the available tools, step 6: integration of other resources, step 7: evaluation.

## 5.1 Identifying Essential Characteristics

There are two approaches to identifying essential characteristics. The first one relies on identifying differences between objects, e.g., in their structure: vase *with* or *without* neck. The second one is based on a morphological analysis of Chinese terms whose characters directly express knowledge about the denoted objects. We will adopt the following notation: essential characteristics will be enclosed between slashes, e.g. /garlic shape mouth/.

### 5.1.1 Differences between Objects

Identifying differences between objects is a useful means towards identifying essential characteristics. The differences can be functional (e.g., vase *for*

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ An “essential characteristic” is a characteristic (abstraction of a property) of a concept and is indispensable to understanding that concept (ISO 1087). Essential characteristics correspond to rigid predicates in DL(Guarino & Guizzardi, 2006) and to rigid properties in</footnote>

<footnote>the OntoClean method (Guarino & Welty, 2004). Unlike essential characteristics, which define the concept, “descriptive characteristics” own values which describe the current state of an object, e.g. weight, colour, etc.</footnote>
decoration, vase for storing), material (in clay, in bronze), structural (with or without foot). Thus, one can rely on the part-of relationship between a whole and its parts to understand the concept the object belongs to (Gerstl & Pribbenow, 1996). The presence or the absence of a component can be interpreted as essential characteristics. For example, a Chinese ceramic vase has a lid, a mouth, a neck, a handle, a shoulder, belly, and foot (Figure 1).

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1: Parts of a vase.</figcaption></figure>

From the handle point of view, vases can be split into vases with handles and vases without handles corresponding to the essential characteristic /with handle/ and /without handle/. The type of vases with handles can be itself specialised according to the different shapes of handles defining as many as corresponding essential characteristics: /dragon-mask handle/, /dragon-shaped handle/, /elephant-shaped handle/, /fish-shaped handle/, /halberd shaped handle/, /phoenix shaped handle/, /pierced handle/, /ribbon shaped handle/, and /Ru-Yi handle/ (Figure 2). These characteristics are exclusive to each other.

### 5.1.2 Morphological Analysis of Chinese Terms

The characters which compose the Chinese terms of vase carry important information about the nature and the description of the objects denoted by the terms.

Terms are composed of a set of characters of which the last one corresponds to the type of vase and the others, called modifiers, precise the type. For example, the Nanjing museum adopts the following order of modifiers for naming Tibetan ceramic (霍华, 1989): dynasty + kiln + glaze + colour + decoration + shape + texture + type. The information conveyed by the modifiers expresses knowledge of different nature, either essential, such as shape, material, and type, or descriptive, like glaze and color. For example, the term “清雍正粉青釉凸花如意耳蒜头瓷瓶” (for convenience of non-Chinese speaker, we put spaces between modifiers) conveys the descriptive characteristics of dynasty (“清” Qing dynasty), emperor (“雍正” Yongzheng mark), glaze-color (“粉青釉” powder blue glaze), and decoration (“凸花” designed with flowers). It also conveys the essential characteristics of handle (“如意耳” Ru-Yi handle), shape (“蒜头” garlic-like head), material (“瓷” porcelain), and type (“瓶” vase). The English translation of the Chinese ceramic terms used by the Nanjing museum does not follow the Chinese order of modifiers, but the following order: glaze + colour + shape + texture + type + decoration + period + kiln. Thus, the previous term “清雍正粉青釉凸花如意耳蒜头瓷瓶” is translated as: “powder blue glaze garlic porcelain vase designed with flowers and Ru-Yi handles, the Yongzheng mark of Qing dynasty”. This object belongs to the type of Garlic-head Vase (“蒜头瓶”).

## 5.2 Combining Essential Characteristic

From the ISO point of view on terminology, a concept is defined as a unique combination of essential characteristics (ISO 1087). Nevertheless, not any combination of essential characteristics defines a meaningful concept from the expert's point of view.

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2: The essential characteristics of the analysis axis of the handle shape.</figcaption></figure>
For the expert, concepts of interest are those that are
named in a natural language. Hence, a concept is a set
of essential characteristics stable enough to be named
in a given language (even if some concepts, without
any designation in natural language, can be
introduced for organisational purposes of the
conceptual system). Terms can be then considered as
guidelines for identifying domain concepts to be
defined from the expert point of view. For example,
the Chinese term “蒜头瓶”, “garlic vase” in English,
denotes the following set of essential characteristics
{/vase/, /one mouth/, /garlic shape mouth/, /ring
foot/}. Based on this formal definition, the definition
in natural language is then: “Vase with a garlic shape
mouth with a ring foot”. We notice that the characters
“圈足” (“ring foot”) do not appear in the name of the
concept, an ellipsis owed to the fact that both types of
garlic vase (Garlic vase I and Garlic vase II) have a
ring foot.

## 5.3 Implementation

The following will present the implementation in
Protégé of our ontology building approach. Concepts
are represented as named classes in Protégé, and
objects as individuals. Terms are represented as labels
(skos:prefLabel, skos:altLabel, skos:definition).
Relations, e.g. ‘hasFunction’, ‘hasComponent’,
‘isMadeOf’, are represented as object properties. For
example, the object property ‘isMadeOf’ whose
domain is the Vessel class and range is the Material
Class, and the object property ‘hasComponent’ whose
domain is the Vessel class and range is the
Component class. Let us note that among the different
types of ‘part-of’ relationships, only the
‘Component/Integral Object’ relationship has been
taken into account (Winston et al., 1987). Descriptive
characteristics are attributes whose values describe
the current state of an object. The TAO CI ontology
includes 10 descriptive characteristics: dynasty,
emperor, kiln, color and glaze, height, diameter of
mouth, diameter of foot, decoration, museum, and
image. The descriptive characteristics are represented
either as data properties, if their value is a data literal,
or as object properties and classes, if the value is an
individual. For example, the decoration characteristic
is represented by the data property ‘isDecoratedBy’
whose domain is the Vessel class and the range is the
String data type. The dynasty to which a vase belongs
is represented by the object property ‘hasDynasty’

whose domain is the Vessel class and the range is the
Dynasty class.

Implementing essential characteristics is a slightly
more complex process. Since essential characteristics
correspond to rigid predicates (Guarino & Guizzardi,
2006) they cannot be directly expressed into
Description Logic. Essential characteristics are
expressed as classes. Thus, essential characteristics
corresponding to parts of vase are subclasses of the
Component class: Lid class, Mouth class, Neck class,
Handle, Shoulder, Belly, Foot class, etc. Some being
themselves specialized into subclasses according to
the different types of parts: LongNeck and ShortNeck
subclasses of the Neck class, RingFoot and
SquareFoot subclasses of the Foot class, etc. Essential
characteristics corresponding to functions, such as
/for decoration/ are subclasses of Function class, etc.
Owning an essential characteristic for a concept
(class) is represented as a restriction of an object
property whose range is the class associated to the
essential characteristic. It means that the class
(concept) is a subclass of the anonymous class
defined by the restriction (see figure 5). For example,
owning the essential characteristic /long neck/ will be
translated into the following restriction of the
‘has_component’ object property: ‘has_component’
some LongNeck. The following restriction of the
‘has_function’ object property: ‘has_function’ some
FunctionForDecoration expresses the owning of the
essential characteristic /for decoration/.

Protégé relies on the open-world assumption,
which means that what is not known to be true is
unknown. In this vein, it is necessary to express
information corresponding to essential characteristics
such as /without handle/, /without lid/, /without foot/,
etc. The object property restriction allows to do that.
For example, owning the /without handle/ essential
characteristic will be translated into the following
object property restriction not (‘has_component’
some Handle).

# 6 TAO CI ONTOLOGY

The TAO CI ontology<fnref n="19" /> contains 165 classes, 11
object properties, 8 data properties, 132 individuals,
and 3124 axioms. It is mapped with CIDOC CRM<fnref n="20" />
(E4_Period, E21_Person, E22_Man-Made_Object,
E57_Material) and AAT.

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ The ontology file is published on
http://www.dh.ketrc.com/otcontainer/data/OTContainer.o
wl</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ http://www cient-crm.org/cidoc-crm/</footnote>
## 6.1 Class

Although our work focuses on Chinese ceramic vases, The TAO CI ontology also includes other types of vessels, such as Box, Bowl, Jar (Figure 3). The Vase class is the core of our work. It includes 41 subclasses representing 41 different types of Chinese ceramic vases (Figure 5).

Let us consider the following example. The concept denoted by the term “arrow vase I”, whose definition in natural language is “vase with a square mouth, long neck, slanting shoulder, pierced handle, bulge belly, and square foot”, is defined by the set of essential characteristics: {/vase/, /square mouth/, /long neck/, /slanting shoulder/, /pierced handle/, /bulge belly/, /square foot/}. It is represented by the ArrowVase_I class defined in OWL as subclass (rdfs:subClassOf) of:

- ArrowVase

- hasComponent some SquareMouth

- hasComponent some LongNeck

- hasComponent some SlantingShoulder

- hasComponent some PiercedHandle

- hasComponent some BulgeBelly

- hasComponent some SquareFoot

## 6.2 Property

Object properties include **belongTo** (domain:Emperor, range: Dynasty), **hasFunction** (domain:Vessel, range:Function), **hasComponent** (domain:Vessel, range: Component), etc.

Data properties include **isDecoratedBy**, **diameterOfFoot**, **height**, **isProducedIn**, **diameterOfMouth**, **mouthNumber**, etc.

## 6.3 Annotations

Annotations allows to enrich the description of the ontology and thus facilitate its understanding and reuse. The RDFS, DC, and SKOS vocabularies are used to express metadata and the linguistic dimension associated to a concept (dc:publisher, dc:license, dc:creator, skos:prefLabel, skos:altLabel, skos:definition, rdfs:comment) as well as to express linking and mapping to external resources (rdfs:seeAlso, skos:broadMatch, skos:exactMatch). For example, the individual *arrow vase 001* is described as follows (Figure 4).

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3: The Vessel class of TAO CI ontology.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

```xml
<owl:NamedIndividual rdf:about="&OTContainer;arrow_vase_002">
  <rdf:type rdf:resource="&OTContainer;ArrowVase_III"/>
  <diameterOfFoot>18</diameterOfFoot>
  <isCollectedIn>THE PALACE MUSEUM</isCollectedIn>
  <numberOfMonth>1</numberOfMonth>
  <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="en">blue-and-white arrow vase painted with lotus flowers, Qianlong mark of Qing dynasty</skos:prefLabel>
  <isDecoratedBy>lotus flowers pattern</isDecoratedBy>
  <height>55</height>
  <diameterOfMonth>11</diameterOfMonth>
  <skos:prefLabel xml:lang="zh">清乾隆青花荷莲纹贯耳瓶</skos:prefLabel>
  <hasEmperor rdf:resource="&OTContainer;Qianlong"/>
  <hasDynasty rdf:resource="&OTContainer;Qing"/>
  <hasGlaze-Color rdf:resource="&OTContainer;blue-and-white"/>
  <isMadeOf rdf:resource="&OTContainer;clay"/>
  <foaf:depiction rdf:resource="https://www.dpm.org.cn/Uploads/Picture/dc/57102.jpg"/>
  <rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="https://www.dpm.org.cn/collection/ceramic/227893.html?hl=%E8%B4%AF%E8%80%B3%E7%93%B6"/>
</owl:NamedIndividual>
```

<caption>Figure 4: The individual *arrow vase 001*.</caption>
<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5: The Vase classes.</figcaption></figure>

# 7 EVALUATION

The last stage of ontology building is ontology evaluation whose main goal is “to assess the quality and correctness of the obtained ontology” (Sabou & Fernandez, 2012). We used two online platforms and queried the ontology against the Competency Questions defined in chapter 3.

The TAO CI ontology was submitted to OOPS!, an online tool to detect some of the most common pitfalls appearing when developing ontologies (Poveda-Villalón et al., 2014). OOPS! has detected only minor pitfalls for the TAO CI ontology (e.g. P08 “Missing annotations”, P13 “Inverse relationships not explicitly declared”).

The TAO CI ontology was also submitted to OntoMetrics, an online platform to calculate more advanced ontology metrics (Lantow, 2016). The table 2 shows some schema metrics and knowledge base metrics results<fnref n="21" /> in relation to ontology clarity and conciseness (Denny, 2010).

<table><caption>Table 2: TAO CI advanced metrics.</caption><thead><tr><td>Metric</td><td>Value</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Attribute richness</td><td>0.048485</td></tr><tr><td>Inheritance richness</td><td>2.715152</td></tr><tr><td>Relationship richness</td><td>0.334324</td></tr><tr><td>Class/Relation ratio</td><td>0.245171</td></tr><tr><td>Average population</td><td>0.8</td></tr><tr><td>Class richness</td><td>0.321212</td></tr></tbody></table>

<footnote n="21">²¹ https://ontometrics.informatik.uni-rostock.de/wiki/in dex.php/Schema_Metrics</footnote>
Most of the scores are very low. That is due to:

* the implementation of essential characteristics in Description Logics. Essential characteristics are translated as classes without any attributes (attribute richness);

* the main goal of the TAO CI ontology is the classification of vases; neither to represent relationships between vases and other artefacts (relationship richness, class/relation ratio), nor to populate the ontology with individuals (average population, class richness).

Evaluation of criteria strongly depends on the aims of the ontology and the choices made in regard to its implementation: “a good ontology does not perform equally well with regards to all criteria” (Denny, 2009).

Let us also note that, in regard to our objectives of classification and terminology, the TAO CI ontology well covers the domain in the sense that each individual clearly falls into a concept (classification), and each concept is clearly defined as a unique combination of essential characteristics (terminology).

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>Figure 6: The competency questions expressed in SPARQL.</figcaption></figure>

The last validation concerns the answers to the Competency Questions. All of them are satisfied. Figure 6 presents 3 competency questions translated into SPARQL and figure 7 the returned results.

Q1: What are the types of a vase?

Q2: What are the Chinese terms and the English terms for subclasses of the class Vase?

Q3: What are the Chinese terms, the English terms, and the images of individuals?

## 8 CONCLUSION

The objectives of the TAO CI project are to provide, first, a knowledge representation of Chinese ceramic of the Ming and Qing dynasties in the form of a domain ontology to be published in the LOD, and, second, a bilingual (Chinese-English) e-dictionary of vases based on the domain ontology. We adopted a term-and-characteristic guided methodology derived from taking into account the ISO principles on Terminology whereby “a term is a verbal designation of a concept” and “a concept is a unique combination of (essential) characteristics”.

In order to identify essential characteristics, the core task of our ontology building methodology, we proposed to combine two approaches. The first one is object-oriented. It consists of identifying differences between objects, either structural or functional. The second one is language-dependent. It relies on a morphological analysis of Chinese terms whose characters convey a lot of useful semantic information about vases.

The implementation of the TAO CI ontology in Protégé raised the problem of how to implement the notion of essential characteristic. Since essential characteristics cannot be directly expressed in Description Logics, we proposed to represent them as classes. Owning an essential characteristic for a concept (class) is then represented as a restriction of an object property whose range is the class associated to the essential characteristic. This means that the concept (class) is a subclass of the anonymous class defined by the restriction.

The result is an open RDF/OWL ontology accessible from the web site http://www.dh.ketrc.com/. A bilingual (Chinese-English) dictionary based on the TAO CI ontology is also accessible from the same web site.

Further work is to be carried out in two different directions. The first one consists in enriching the linguistic dimension. Currently terms are reduced to labels on class, some vocabularies such OntoLex-Lemon would allow to represent the linguistic
<table><thead><tr><th>name_en</th><th>name_zh</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>"arrow vase"@en</td><td>"贵耳瓶"@zh</td></tr><tr><td>"double-gourd vase"@en</td><td>"葫芦瓶"@zh</td></tr><tr><td>"gall-bladder vase"@en</td><td>"胆式瓶"@zh</td></tr><tr><td>"garlic-head vase"@en</td><td>"蒜头瓶"@zh</td></tr><tr><td>"olive shaped vase"@en</td><td>"橄榄瓶"@zh</td></tr><tr><td>"plum vase"@en</td><td>"梅瓶"@zh</td></tr></tbody></table>

Result of the Q1

<table><thead><tr><th>x</th><th>name</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>http://www.dh.ketr.corn/otcontainer/data/OTContainer.owl#ArrowVase</td><td>"贵耳瓶"@zh</td></tr><tr><td>http://www.dh.ketr.corn/otcontainer/data/OTContainer.owl#DoubleGourdShapedVase</td><td>"葫芦瓶"@zh</td></tr><tr><td>http://www.dh.ketr.corn/otcontainer/data/OTContainer.owl#Gall-bladderVase</td><td>"胆式瓶"@zh</td></tr><tr><td>http://www.dh.ketr.corn/otcontainer/data/OTContainer.owl#Garlic-headVase</td><td>"蒜头瓶"@zh</td></tr><tr><td>http://www.dh.ketr.corn/otcontainer/data/OTContainer.owl#Olive-shapedVase</td><td>"橄榄瓶"@zh</td></tr><tr><td>http://www.dh.ketr.corn/otcontainer/data/OTContainer.owl#PlumVase</td><td>"梅瓶"@zh</td></tr></tbody></table>

Result of the Q2

<table><tr><td>http://www.dh.ketr.corn/otcontainer/data/OTContainer.owl#arrow_vase_001</td><td>“清乾隆青花<br>莲花托八宝纹<br>贵耳瓶”@zh<br>https://www.dpm.org.cn/Uploads/Picture/dc/3664.jpg</td></tr><tr><td>http://www.dh.ketr.corn/otcontainer/data/OTContainer.owl#arrow_vase_002</td><td>“清乾隆青花<br>荷莲纹贵耳<br>瓶”@zh<br>https://www.dpm.org.cn/Uploads/Picture/dc/57102.jpg</td></tr><tr><td>http://www.dh.ketr.corn/otcontainer/data/OTContainer.owl#arrow_vase_003</td><td>“清宣统东青<br>釉杏圆<br>瓶”@zh<br>https://www.dpm.org.cn/Uploads/Picture/dc/16328.jpg</td></tr></table>

Result of the Q3

<caption>Figure 7: An excerpt of the results.</caption>

dimension. The second one aims to complete the ontology by taking into account additional types of ceramic vessels.

## ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has received generous funding by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) in the framework of a PhD program between Liaocheng University and University Savoie Mont-Blanc.

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