The Village Information Form for the digital museum of Chinese traditional villages, published in 2018, is a foundational document for digital archiving of ancient villages. Created by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development with support from the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design and local administrative departments, it provides a unified template for documenting traditional villages nationwide. This form emphasizes the systematic recording of basic village information and architectural culture, covering geographic location, historical development, architectural characteristics, and cultural heritage. It highlights detailed documentation of village history, migration processes, significant historical figures, and major events. For cultural heritage, it systematically captures data on architectural elements (names, materials, styles, and functional layouts) and includes non-material aspects such as folklore, festivals, rituals, and local dialects, along with information on cultural activities and inheritors of intangible heritage. Notably, the form also includes data on local cuisine, products, and tourism resources, supporting economic development and cultural tourism initiatives.

The Text-Based Archiving Form and Image-Based Registration Form from the Chinese Traditional Village Network were developed as part of the ‘Preserving Nostalgia—Traditional Village Survey and Archiving’ project, launched in 2014 with support from the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and various cultural organizations. These guidelines focus on comprehensive documentation of cultural and social life, including social structure, population distribution, customs, production methods, natural and cultural heritage, and historical changes, supplemented by extensive visual materials. The rules emphasize combining textual and visual data to document the natural environment, geological conditions, village morphology, architectural relics, and street information, aiming to capture the interconnectedness of human and natural elements. For cultural heritage, the guidelines prioritize recording items listed in heritage registries, such as historical artifacts, family histories, and manuscript collections, often supported by photographs to vividly depict traditional customs, production activities, and even village inhabitants.

The classification scheme for digital resources of Gaoqian Houku Village, developed by Renmin University of China, was created under a major National Social Science Fund project focusing on the digital preservation and transmission of historical and cultural villages. Starting in 2016 with Gaoqian Village in Xianju County, Zhejiang Province, the project has emphasized the use of digital technologies for resource classification and association. This framework is technically oriented, facilitating the digitization and dissemination of cultural resources. It incorporates oral history recordings, such as interviews with elder villagers and cultural inheritors, to preserve the living memories of ancient villages. Additionally, it provides guidelines for 3D modeling and digital collection of spatial layouts, natural environments, and architectural structures. The framework is characterized by its focus on historical records, family genealogies, manuscripts, and multimedia documentation, showcasing a professional archival approach.

A comparative analysis of the three archiving rules in terms of data structures, content coverage, and technological applications revealed distinctive characteristics. The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development’s rule emphasizes standardization and comprehensiveness, focusing on detailed basic data for unified national management and systematic conservation. The Chinese traditional village network’s guidelines prioritize cultural and social life, combining textual and visual documentation to highlight the depth and breadth of cultural transmission and social structures. Renmin University’s framework centers on the structured management and association of digital resources, leveraging modern technologies to enhance the efficiency and dissemination of archival materials.

Despite these strengths, existing rules primarily offer checklist-style guidelines for data collection without fine-grained annotation standards for the cultural, heritage, and memory elements within the archives. This limitation makes it difficult to identify distinct cultural characteristics from archived data, leading to the phenomenon of ‘standardized archiving with little distinction’.

To address this issue, this study identified a core set of cultural elements shared across the three rules, forming the foundational vocabulary for the proposed ontology framework. As illustrated in Figure 1, the study integrates key concepts related to village history, spatial relationships, and human elements. Cultural elements concerning historical narratives include the development history of villages, family lineages, heritage evolution, and architectural history. Spatial elements emphasize natural landscapes, cultural landmarks, spatial layouts, and architectural imagery. Human elements focus on identifying key figures who have significantly influenced the historical and spatial development of ancient villages.

The systematic identification of core cultural elements of ancient villages addresses the limitations in data annotation within the three major archiving rules. However, it lacks the establishment of diversified relationships between elements, failing to support deeper exploration and discovery of cultural knowledge associated with ancient villages. Moreover, the identified core elements exhibit semantic redundancy or ambiguity when aligned with common semantic frameworks in cultural heritage or historical research. This necessitates further work on semantic disambiguation and alignment to build a systematic and clear semantic model. Such a model would facilitate uncovering humanistic connections within ancient village archives and establish linkages between these archives and other related historical and cultural heritage resources.

The CIDOC-CRM is an internationally recognized conceptual model developed by the International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). It establishes a universal and extensible semantic framework for integrating cultural heritage information, enabling semantic definitions and structured descriptions of concepts and relationships in cultural heritage resources. The model’s comprehensive descriptions of entities (e.g., entity) and properties (e.g., property) allow accurate depiction and relational mapping of key aspects such as people, places, and events associated with ancient villages. This makes it well- suited for resource integration and organization.

For this study, the CIDOC-CRM model was adapted to represent the geographical location of villages using the E53 Place category, individuals of historical significance as E21 Person, and relationships such as P8 took place on (linking events to relevant objects) and P74 had current or former residence (indicating places of residence over time). However, the generic nature of CIDOC-CRM presents limitations in addressing the specific characteristics of ancient villages. For example, the E41 Appellation category does not adequately represent the unique cultural designations of villages, which include architectural styles, traditional crafts, natural landscapes, and historical artifacts. Therefore, this study extended the ‘appellation’ attribute to describe distinct cultural elements based on traditional archiving rules.

The event ontology provides a structured framework for describing and categorizing events, offering concepts such as event: event, event: factor (elements within an event), and event: product (event outcomes). However, it lacks specificity for relationships commonly seen in the historical events of Chinese ancient villages, such as indirect causal links between village founding or migration and family-related events, or implicit correlations between customs or production habits and wartime events. This study first categorized common historical event types of ancient villages and plans to further analyze complex event relationships in future research.

Existing narrative ontology research, while lacking uniform semantic frameworks, typically describes characters, their attributes and actions, story locations, and related events. These narrative elements complement the CIDOC-CRM and event ontology by filling gaps in the description of narrative aspects, particularly character-related attributes.

Based on the reuse of general ontologies, this study constructed a preliminary semantic framework for ancient villages. The framework was integrated with digital archive data from Gaoqian village in Zhejiang Province, which the research team has been developing since 2016. The framework was evaluated against a classification directory and conceptual model of cultural resources agreed upon by an expert team specializing in ancient villages. Expert feedback indicated that the current model provides high coverage of cultural elements, accurately infers relationships between cultural heritage and historical events, and offers good extensibility for unique features in the natural and cultural environments of ancient villages.

Building upon the classification and alignment of core cultural elements, this study expanded descriptions to capture the unique cultural phenomena and attributes of ancient villages. The resulting digital archiving system centers on ancient villages and encompasses seven major entities, 29 relationships, and 94 properties. As shown in the partial entity-relationship (ER) diagram in Figure 2, the semantic framework includes six main categories: basic village information, natural heritage, tangible cultural heritage, intangible cultural heritage, historical documents, historical events, and notable figures.

This framework aims to support in-depth exploration of the historical context, spatial relationships, and human networks of ancient villages, providing a foundation for uncovering and analyzing their rich cultural heritage.

Henan Province boasts abundant political, military, artistic, and cultural resources, nurturing ancient cities and preserving numerous historically rich ancient villages. This study selects four villages in Henan: Haishangqiao, Yuanqiao, Youdian, and Dawangmiao —for integrated analysis of their digital archive resources. By conducting semantic analysis based on the semantic framework proposed in this study, the research aims to verify the applicability of the semantic framework to the analysis of actual digital archives of ancient villages and explore innovative paths for constructing and presenting humanistic knowledge associations within ancient villages.

These four villages, all listed in the catalogue of Chinese traditional villages, possess rich archival resources covering almost every aspect of the archiving system, with unique characteristics for each village: Haishangqiao preserves intact archives of notable residences and biographies, featuring a wealth of personal records; Yuanqiao retains plaques from the Ming and Qing dynasties and historic buildings, offering substantial tangible archives; Youdian, known for its distinctive cave dwellings and sunken courtyards, holds abundant property-related archives and Dawangmiao served as the site of Henan University during the anti-Japanese war period and contains significant manuscript archives related to red cultural resources. From the perspective of archival resource types, the digital archives of these four villages are primarily composed of text and image resources, with limited digitalized audio and video resources. In terms of archival content, most of the information concentrates on the past 50 years, with some records of legends and background concerning the villages’ founding but lacking detailed textual and physical documentation. The specific conditions of the digital archives of these four villages are presented in Table 4 (see Table 4).

Based on resources such as village chronicles, museum collections, oral accounts from villagers, and field visit photographs, this study first standardized and annotated the data using Excel, following the semantic framework for digital archives of ancient villages described in Section 3.2. Subsequently:

Hierarchical entities were created using Protégé, with relationships and attributes added to incorporate the resources of the four villages. A knowledge base was built in Protege. To ensure clarity, flexibility, and distinctiveness, the OntoGraf visualization plugin was used to present the framework. For instance, Haishangqiao village highlights residential buildings associated with the Wang family, while Yuanqiao emphasizes the relational network of the Yuan family.

Haishangqiao village, located in Dayugou town, Gongyi city, Zhengzhou, Henan province, is renowned for its historically significant Wang family genealogy and the ‘Haishangqiao village chronicle‘. The history of the village’s resources can be traced back to the Qianlong era of the Qing dynasty, with textual and image data as the primary materials. The village’s historic architectural complex is a remarkable sight, with its overall layout well-preserved. The Wang family residence, as an iconic building, highlights the village’s unique cultural characteristics. Within the resource framework, ‘residential buildings’ emerge as a central element, radiating outward to form a distinct spatial layout. Detailed records of folk customs and daily life are also fully reflected in the framework, offering subsequent researchers an abundant and meticulous collection of materials.

Yuanqiao village, located in Dajindian town, Dengfeng city, Henan province, possesses abundant resources. Centered on the village chronicle ‘talking about Yuanqiao’, the archives provide detailed records of biographies, historical relics, events, and folk customs, with its history tracing back to the Hongwu era of the Ming dynasty. Numerous immovable cultural relics, including a significant number of inscribed stone tablets, have been well preserved. In the resource framework diagram, the Yuan family lineage serves as the main thread, clearly illustrating the continuity and evolution of Yuanqiao village in terms of folk culture, village development, historical progression, and economic growth.

Youdian village, situated in Shanhuo Town, Yanshi District, Luoyang City, Henan province, is notable for its distinctive sunken courtyards and well-preserved immovable cultural relics such as stone tablets, plaques, ancestral halls, and temples. The Hua family, with its 22-generation genealogy, is central to the village’s history. The village chronicle ‘Hua family genealogy’ documents the village’s history, biographies, public heritage, and the unique historical narratives of its stone tablets in great detail. In the resource framework diagram, ‘Youdian village chronicle’ forms the core, supported by immovable relics and public heritage. The diagram illustrates the village’s historical development, traces of its prominent figures, and the literary corpus centered on its numerous stone tablets, presenting a vivid and multidimensional portrayal of Youdian Village.

Dawangmiao village, located in Tantou town, Luanchuan county, Luoyang city, Henan province, was once a campus of Henan university. The site still preserves the former women’s dormitory of the university and holds rich red cultural resources, although some public heritage has suffered damage. The village’s archives focus on its wartime history and Henan university’s educational legacy. In the resource framework diagram, prominent figures are mainly educators and teachers, while most immovable cultural relics are associated with Henan university, including the women’s dormitory and teaching tools. Folk stories center on red narratives of resistance against foreign invaders during the war. These elements collectively highlight Dawangmiao village as a red cultural site rooted in patriotism and national sentiment.