A Common Base of Knowledge for Japanese Historical Materials and its Application

In the paper we describe the fundamental elements for handling and managing Japanese historical information such as catalogue, image, text, spatial, temporal, personal name, and introduce an application using the fundamental elements. Our Institution (The Historiographical Institute, the University of Tokyo) has been constructing and providing the information related to Japanese history and Japanese historical materials for more than 130 years. There is a diversity of data items for the materials, because data items added by some factors such as collections, eras and types are different. In order to make it easy to use the collected historical materials, we set fundamental items of them. We explain the features of each element. We will also describe the applications using that elements and their effects.