Interlinking Multilingual LOD Resources: A Study on Connecting Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Resources Using the Unihan Database

This study proposes a novel method with which Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) resources on the Web can be effectively matched and connected. The three countries share Chinese characters even though Japan and Korea have their own language. Utilizing the Unihan database, which covers more than 45,000 characters commonly used by the three countries, we show that the proposed method outperforms the traditional method based on string matching in finding similar characters and words used in these countries. The results represent a first step towards overcoming the multilingual barrier in semantically interlinking Asian LOD resources. Linked Open Data (LOD) is an international endeavor to interlink structured data on the Web and create the Web of Data on a global level. Linking data can be achieved by understanding the semantic relationships between data and building explicit links for them. Hence, semantically matching and connecting resources in different languages is crucial to successfully building linked open data around the world. Approximately 60 percent of the world population is Asians. Resolving multilingual issues for the Asian population is one of the important yet challenging tasks as Asian countries mostly use their own writing systems. Those approaches that have been developed for English alphabets and Western language systems cannot be readily adapted to Asian languages systems as their writing systems are based on different assumptions and conventions. Most of the LOD frameworks have focused on Western language resources and most of the open resources in the LOD cloud are connected to the West, significantly hampering the effort to make the LOD cloud truly a global data space. In this study, we propose a novel method for matching and interlinking Asian LOD resources and then empirically validate the proposed method using Silk Workbench, an application developed in conjunction with the LOD2 EU-FP7 project. China, Japan, and Korea, shortened as CJK, are geographically close and collectively account for the largest population in Asia. The three countries have had mutual interactions for over a thousand years influencing each other’s language system. In particular, Japan and Korea have been affected by the Chinese ideographic characters (Han Chinese), which were used by the Han race a long time ago, which still has a strong impact on the Han Chinese characters used in CJK. Our work exploits the fact that these three countries share the origins and semantics of certain characters even though those characters have developed into often differently looking characters over time.