About
In today's China, with Shenzhou spacecraft soaring to space, Jiaolong submersible diving into the deep sea, high-speed rails stretching across thousands of miles, and multiple aircraft carriers in service, the nation has grown increasingly powerful. New innovations like short videos, mobile payment, the sharing economy, and artificial intelligence have made our daily lives and entertainment far richer and more convenient. If you need to go somewhere, just open a map app on your phone, enter the address, and it will automatically calculate the optimal route for you.
But recently, while our team was collaborating on the early stages of a Chinese ancient architecture mapping project, we ran into a problem: some national-level protected cultural heritage buildings are not listed on either Baidu Maps or Amap, and the number of missing provincial and municipal-level protected buildings is even higher. To confirm the exact locations of certain ancient structures, we went to great lengths: we searched for news articles, travelogues, and photos for cross-referencing, carefully identified buildings that looked like pagodas but were only a dozen or so pixels in size on satellite maps. Sometimes we even had to dig through relevant academic papers to verify the locations of these cultural relics.
Ditushu (https://www.ditushu.com) is a humanities and geography knowledge database collaborative platform operated by the volunteer team of Ageeye (https://www.ageeye.cn). It aims to build a comprehensive collection of humanities and geography data covering historical administrative divisions, ancient cities, ancient architecture, classical literature, archaeology, ancient military affairs, intangible cultural heritage, and more, through a model of open knowledge sharing and collaborative contribution.
Ageeye is a non-profit public platform launched in 2015 that allows users to create and share knowledge maps. It now has 30,000 registered users who have created tens of thousands of maps, thousands of which are publicly available, earning widespread recognition among enthusiasts and professional researchers in relevant fields. The project is run transparently by volunteers, with operational reports published quarterly. However, for individual creators, geographic datasets are massive, the mapping process is tedious and cumbersome, and the requirements for accuracy and completeness are extremely high. After years of exploration, we found that the individual map-creation model struggles to produce high-quality content, so we began a full transformation in 2019 and launched this new platform.
Ditushu is designed to provide a full suite of services including management, query, analysis, collaboration, sharing, and discussion of lightweight structured knowledge bases, for research institutions, individual creators, humanities enthusiasts, and students. The 'Di' (地) in Ditushu stands for geography and the Earth, the 'Tu' (图) refers to visual query and analysis, and the 'Shu' (书) symbolizes knowledge and culture. Ditushu is an integrated platform combining text, data, maps, charts, and knowledge graphs. Each Ditushu project has a fully customized data structure to meet the diverse needs of different research topics. We will organize volunteers to complete a large number of open collaborative humanities and geography knowledge base projects, and also invite renowned scholars, authors, and official institutions to share more high-quality research outcomes. By continuously aggregating reliable, high-quality content, we aim to build a massive humanities and geography knowledge graph that is open for free use by the entire public.
Operating the platform with an open mindset and using the open platform to promote knowledge sharing is our core operational philosophy. We encourage content creators to use standard Creative Commons licenses to open up data access as much as possible, or allow direct downloads. Every project on Ditushu starts with the author's nickname to acknowledge their contribution. At the same time, we respect creators' efforts and rights: authors can choose from multiple licensing options including CC0 (public domain dedication), CC-BY (attribution), CC-BY-SA (attribution-shareAlike), CC-BY-NC-SA (attribution-nonCommercial-shareAlike), and paid access, based on their preferences.
These structured databases are not limited to geographic data: for example, the Chinese Ancient Maps project consists of high-definition images, the Humanities and Geography Resource Collection is a directory of websites, and the Chinese Ancient Military Geography project is a structured version of printed publications. In short, we collect all useful data. In addition, we are in talks with many scholars and institutions for cooperation, and will soon release content such as academic research datasets and independent scholars' research outcomes.
We also welcome enthusiasts in related fields to join us, work together on this massive undertaking, and contribute to the inheritance and revival of our national culture. Since we released our first project, Chinese Ancient Maps, in March, we have launched 6 public projects, with more than 10 in the pipeline. Over a hundred current students from top universities across the country and working professionals from various industries have already joined this initiative.
