An Ontology for Chinese Government Archives Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

Government archives comprise a series of documents or important information resources produced or used by government departments to meet the needs of economic and social governance, fulfill government functions, and perform official activities. They have inestimable value in economic development, social operations, and strategy. However, due to the lack of effective application of knowledge management technology, government information resources are locked in archive records, making it difficult to achieve knowledge organization and interoperability. Based on the theories and methods of the semantic web and semantic ontology construction, we summarize the relevant domain knowledge of government archives and construct the Chinese Government Archive Ontology (GAO) with the collection of government archives as the data. The ontology model implements the semantic interoperability between government archives and performs knowledge representation and reasoning on their content. We define the classes and properties of GAO, describe its creation process in detail, and demonstrate its applicability in practice through SPARQL query and event logical representation based on the 5W1H framework. GAO is capable of realizing linked data and discovering the knowledge hidden behind the policies of various agencies and departments, which can serve scientific decision-making and the economic society, regulate institutional powers, and further promote the research and practice of archival science in the digital age.