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Personnel information of officials has been an extremely useful source for research in Chinese history. The conventional way is to compile such information into a reference book. The linear organization of a book, however, makes it difficult to fully utilize the information. For instance, if the book is arranged chronologically, then it is hard to find all the positions that an official had assumed in his life time. In a previous study, a query system for the book “Taiwan Officials during Qing Dynasty”, was developed (http://140.112.30.230/Career_tb/). This system fully integrated the content of that book and provided search for year, office title, and person name. However, the system was built by “hardwiring” the content, leaving little room for extension. In this thesis we present a design with a flexible data model. On the functionality level, the front end search facility of the new system does not go beyond the previous one. However, the content of the book is engineered with a more flexible data model to allow easy extension and modification of the data. The separation of the data model and the front-end presentation also makes it easier to apply our approach to other reference books of a similar nature. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we completely rebuilt the “Taiwan official search engine” mentioned above. We have also built a prototype for the book List of Officials of Qing Dynasty (清季職官表) edited by the Institute of Modern History of the Academia Sinica.
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