2nd-Year : Subproject (1)
The Study and Organization of Documents, Images, Geographical and Historical Records

The main goal of this project is to develop digital museum bases for China's rich cultural heritage, priceless treasures, and superb artifacts. The plan is to take advantage of the Internet's influence on the population to actively promote the "Digital Museum Plan." This is an attempt to raise content quality on the Internet, using this valuable tool to elevate popular standards of culture, art, and science.

The project displays Chinese culture. This rich culture reached a peak in the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD), so this era has been selected as the background for the digital museum. One of best model of the culture interchange of Eastern and Western regions in Tang dynasty is the master Xuanzang's A Record of the Tang's Western Regions Western Regions Western Reach. There is a kind of similarities of the information interchange between the ancient Silk Road and today's World Wide Web. Through the comparison of the history and today, we can understand the universal necessary of culture interchange and enhance the international horizons and admirable courage of Master Xuanzang.

Another important content of the project is to use the popular novel Wukong Monkey Travels to the West as a reference to stimulate users' interest. In other words, the project plans to use the historical Record of the Tang's Western Reach as a base, contrasted to the popular Wukong Monkey. Using this beloved story will take advantage of the Internet's influence to actively promote the digital museum plan. This is different from traditional scholarly research projects, because it is available to both educational organizations and society at large.

In short, the project bases on the organization of documents and historical records of the first sub-project. Establishing an interactive 3D virtual digital museum for The World of Xuanzang and Silk Road of the second sub-project.And the 3D virtual reality technology, GIS, and database retrieval system of the third sub-project.

In Year 1, we built a first version of the Digital Museum (http://mars.csie.ntu.tw/silk) using the work of the organization of documents and historical record of this project. Based on Xuanzang's trip in China silk road, seven themes were builtt:

  • Record of the Tang Dynasty's Western Reach: historical viewpoints·
  • Silk Road: its geography, including video and GIS virtual tours·
  • Journey to the West: literary viewpoints·
  • Art Historical Collection: artistic and cultural viewpoints·
  • Interactive Learning: technology for e-learning·
  • Database Look-up: a powerful search tool·
  • Buddhist Electronic Dictionary
In Year 2, we will extend these themes to cover Xuanzang's routes into ancient Central Asia and India. Further, we will link themes where connections exist. For example, the Tang Dynasty's Western Reach can organizing access to other information, integrating maps, chronologies, database access, and multimedia.

National Taiwan University | Chung-Hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies | National Inst. of the Arts.    Copyright 2002