# Ontology-Driven Cultural Heritage Conservation: A Case of _The Anales of Confucius_
## 1 Introduction  
Cultural Heritage is a civilization's memory of a country or a society, as well as the wealth shared by people all over the world. It records the thoughts and activities of the ancients who lived in a certain area and at a certain time. Cultural heritage is divided into the tangible cultural heritage and intangible cultural heritage (ICH). According to _Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage_[1] reported by UNSECO, \"Intangible Cultural Heritage means the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills--as well as the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated therewith--that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage.\" As the most important one among the rich ICH of China, Confucianism has been transmitted from generation to generation for over 2200 years and has been interpreted by thinkers in different eras, including thinkers in the present. Literally, the reason to recognize it as the most essential ICH of China is that Confucianism is the cultural foundation of Chinese society since the Qin dynasty (221 BCE-207 BCE) until the beginning of the 20 th century. The main content of Confucian culture is condensed in the book named _The Anales of Confucius_ (Chinese: Luryu), which was written during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period (770 BCE-221 BCE). The difficulty of understanding _The Anales of Confucius_ lies in two aspects. One is that this book is a collection of dialogues; thus, it is difficult to understand its meaning without context. Second, there are great differences between ancient Chinese and modern Chinese. Therefore, compared with the requirement of other cultural heritages, which is to be preserved, Confucianism needs tobe represented in more modern ways such that people with different cultural backgrounds can understand it better.  
People in different dynasties of China all faced the problems mentioned above more or less and attempted to solve them. In Chinese history, many scholars annotated _The Analects of Confucius_. One of the most famous scholars is [PERSON], who lived in the Southern Song Dynasty, and his contributions will be referenced in this study in later chapters. In the modern era, the form of research on _The Analects of Confucius_ varies from annotation to illustration, translation, etc. However, although much effort has been paid, it is still hard to clearly define Confucianism. Since the challenge to comprehend _The Analects of Confucius_ derives from the illogicality of the text and the barrier of the ancient Chinese, this study attempts to reshape its core content--the morality system of Confucianism, based on ontology to propose an approach to solve this problem. Ontology is a modeling tool that could be used to describe concepts of information systems on semantic and knowledge levels [2]. Conversely, the Confucian morality system is embodied in the concept of some single characters that are independent in form but related in connotation. From the perspective of requirement and function, the formalization and clarity of ontology are exactly in line with the purpose of reshaping ideas in _The Analects of Confucius_. The outcome of this study, Lunyu ontology, aims to devote contributions to both providing a new way to learn about Confucianism and expanding the application of this methodology.  
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 briefly introduces the history of Confucianism and describes the domain of research, Section 3 puts forwards the objectives, Section 4 reviews the state of the art, Section 5 is dedicated to our contribution to ontology building methodology relying on a meaning analysis of Chinese terms and the ISO principles on Terminology, Section 6 presents the Lunyu ontology in Protege, and the final section presents the evaluation of the Lunyu ontology.