Ontology-Driven Cultural Heritage Conservation: A Case of The Analects of Confucius
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This is a well-executed project on an important subject, and yielded impressive results. The manuscript will benefit from copy-editing by someone proficient in English. I have marked up some of the most important ambiguities or typos in the attached copy of the manuscript. Congratulations to the authors for tackling this complex problem and building a valuable tool for supporting scholarship in Confucian Ethics.
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Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
This paper applies an ontolgy technique to Confucius documents and tries to build a standardized ( in W3C format) database. In my understanding, a database organized by ontorogy must be designed with a clear image of its users. Unfortunately, the current objective of this study (section 3 in line 140) does not describe the contribution or value of a structured database to such a specific user. Next, in line 324, the evaluation of the proposed database is too abstract to convince us of the usefulness of the database. Especially, even there are some "0" evaluations, no further explanations or reasons for such the low scores are provided. While it is true about the discussion in the reference [43], no discussion for the purpose of database and for such the low scores simply suggests that the value of the database in this study is simply "low". For example, one of the main motivation for building ontology database is to give structured relationships between the concepts in the "universe of the topics". related in the main subject of the target issue. In this study, the many concepts appeared in Confucianizm need to be clearly organized, structured and mutually interrelated. The scores in table 3 for the relations or the richness of concepts are very poor, so I can not understand the value of the database. Another issue is how to deal with the metaphors contained in the source text. For academicians, the concerns for such the aspect would not be negligible, but they are not mentioned in this study. Anyway, all the problems in this paper seems to stem from the lack of a description of the purpose of database. Please update the entire discussion of the paper, carefully.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
This article explores the development of an ontology to represent a particular element of intangible cultural heritage, specifically, depictions of morality in the Analects of Confucius.
The subject matter is of great interest and is not widely explored in the literature, so the originality of the paper is high. Because it is likely that the ontology can support many novel approaches toward accessing and working with this information, there is also potential that it will lead to beneficial impact - for example, learning and teaching objects based on this work.
The methodology used in constructing the ontology is very sound. The authors have restricted the scope of the ontology to depictions of morality, but indicate that they would like to cover other topics in future. It would be of interest to know how long it took them to complete the work that is reported here.
One major point that I would like to bring up is that the article does not give a very intuitive introduction to the ontology itself, other than through responses to the competency questions. Perhaps it would be helpful to the reader to provide, for example, a visualisation of the class hierarchy of the ontology, to give them an accessible idea of the topics covered.
On l.215 - it may be useful to draw out exactly what is meant by 'granular' here, and why CIDOC or EDM are not suitable.
In general the paper is accessibly written but there are many minor language issues and a few which render parts of the paper difficult to read - for example, l. 43-46 is not clear to me. A thorough proofread would be very helpful.
Finally, I would suggest that a discussion of the effectiveness of the approach would be very useful. For now, the process of developing the ontology is covered. It would be helpful to give your review on what the knowledge structure does - initially in terms of the competency questions, which have been covered, but also, I would suggest, in terms of the relevance of the ontology to a broader audience. Having created it, how might someone use it in teaching, for example, or to support research, or perhaps to contrast the morality of Confucianism against another similarly represented resource?
I would like to thank the authors for the opportunity to review this thought-provoking research.
Author Response
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Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The reviewers' questions were answered by the authors. The paper was judged to be at the level of publication.
Author Response
Thanks for the reviewer's patient correction of this article.
