Study On TCM Ancient Books' Metadata On The Basis Of Knowledge Element In Information Technology

As the main carrier of TCM knowledge, TCM ancient books have been the sources of Traditional Medicine's inheritance, innovation and development in all times. To collate and study the TCM ancient books is an important method which accords with Traditional Medicine's own rules. The reason why TCM ancient books can hand down to generations is that scholars through all dynasties have been collating and studying the ancient books.But now, traditional collation methods and the way in deriving knowledge are far from adequate to meet the accelerated growing demands of TCM. Since the end of 20^th century, modern information technology headed by computer and internet has been rapidly developing, and has been adopted in the field of humanities and social sciences more and more widely. The modernization in methods of collating TCM ancient books, and the digitization of ancient books resources have gradually met the need in obtaining and utilizing information for modern people, and greatly promoted the inheritance and development of TCM knowledge, and also solved some problems, for example, the carrier of ancient books and the way of spreading are rather backward, the efficiency in collating, utilizing and developing is rather low, especially lots of knowledge contained in ancient books can not be exploited adequately.As the new method and new technology generated under the combination of ancient books' collation and modern Science and Technology, the digitization of TCM ancient books keeps up with the requirement of times. It will be the major trend of future development in ancient books' collation, and in the digital time, it is also the continuance and development of TCM ancient books' collation and study work.While it formed a strong contrast with the rapid development of ancient books' digitalization, that the theoretical study of ancient books' digitalization is rather weak. During the past 30 years, we understood from the gains or losses during the development of ancient books' digitalization more and more clearly that, only the intensive, practical theoretical study and idealistic innovation are the key motivations to promote the development of ancient books' collation indeed. In every stage, corresponding theory must be needed to support and guide ancient books' digitalization development.From a standpoint of literature study and ancient books collation, my tutor, Prof. Liu Changhua, creatively put up a new theory to guide intensive development of ancient books, knowledge representation method of TCM ancient books on the basis of knowledge element in computer language.According to the above theory, the author made systematic study on the metadata of TCM ancient books. In the paper, four parts were discussed. In the first part, through studying the theoretical origin and basis, it was further verified that digitalization of ancient books belongs to ancient books' collation essentially. In the second part, the construction and development course of the theory system were researched systematically, and the new progress of the theoretical study on knowledge element was highlighted in the paper. In the third part, the metadata standardization system of TCM ancient books was discussed systematically. Through studying the metadata of TCM ancient books, the metadata classification system of TCM ancient books represented by knowledge element was constructed. In the fourth part, six kinds of knowledge element examples of TCM ancient books were enumerated to explain how the semantics metadata of TCM ancient books were applied in the indexing work of knowledge element.