# Ontology-Driven Cultural Heritage Conservation: A Case of _The Anales of Confucius_
## 2 Foundation of Research
### Description about Data Resource  
Obviously, all content of Confucianism is too complex and profound; thus, this study selected the most core part of it, the morality system, to promote our work. The domain of this research can be outlined as follow four constraints:  
1. All concepts, therefore, all terms, come from _The Analects of Confucius_.
2. Every concept is related to Confucian morality.
3. Meanings of terms which points to the concepts are referenced from _Shisanjing Dictionary_[9] and _The Analects of Confucius Variorum_[10].
4. Meanings of terms irrelevant to Confucian morality are not considered.  
The first constraint is based on the fact that Confucian culture experienced a process of continuous derivation and scholars in different times made different interpretations of Confucianism. _The Analects of Confucius_ mainly records the dialogues between [PERSON] and his disciples, some of the events of his life, and disciple's comments on [PERSON]; thus, it is not a philosophical book that logically introduces the thought system of [PERSON]. If any book other than _the Analects of Confucian_ was involved, there may be ambiguity in the connotation of a specific concept. Even if the scope was limited to such a book, there is no worry if some important concepts have been missed, because _The Analects of Confucius_ comparably concentrated embodies the political views, ethical thoughts, moral concepts, and educational principles of [PERSON] and Confucian school. _The Analects of Confucius_ seems to be short in length, but actually, as mentioned above, it covers many aspects of Confucian Culture.  
[PERSON] advocated telling rather than writing; thus, _The Analects of Confucius_ did not describe or explain [PERSON]'s thoughts, and even if they recorded what [PERSON] said, they did not record the context and background of the dialogues. Therefore, each chapter of _The Analects of Confucius_ is only a few sentences long and almost independent from each other. This is why the second limitation is that concepts should be related to morality.  
In particular, ancient Chinese is dominated by monosyllabic words, that is, a word represents an independent and complete meaning; thus, all concepts in our ontology appear in the form of a single word in _The Analects of Confucius_. These particularities of this book caused another problem for this study, that is, it is impossible to find the characteristics of these concepts in the original text. It led to the third condition that _Shisanjing Dictionary_ and _The Analects of Confucius Variorum_ provide meanings of terms. Actually, the entries in the _Shisanjing Dictionary_ already contain almost all the meaningful words (i.e., characters) in _The Analects of Confucius_ and list all their explanations that occurred in this book. While some of them are still not detailed or comprehensive enough and were replenished by [PERSON]'s annotation in _The Analects of Confucius Variorum_. Of course, meaning items of terms referring to moral concepts have been eliminated if they are not within the scope of Confucian morality, as the fourth constraint says.  
To sum up, we obtained all terms from _The Analects of Confucius_ with the guide of experts. In order to ensure the accuracy of the comprehension of Confucianism, we acquired the meanings of each term from the _Shisanjing Dictionary_, a dictionary specially compiled for 13 Confucian classics, and [PERSON]'s _The Analects of Confucius Variorum_ of The Southern Song Dynasty (960-1279) as a complement.