With the spread of the Internet, large volumes of text data related to local communities or societies are being distributed on the Web, and the texts’ contents change significantly with large-scale disasters, political changes, or national elections, among others. If we can estimate the moments at which the texts’ contents change, we can consider that it indicates the possibility that some change occurred in society. Based on the above, this paper explores a new direction for area studies based on informatics compatible with the Internet age to detect Tipping Points in areas.

Collecting, sharing, and preserving digital research assets are essential for improving knowledge production’s efficiency and reliability. However, efforts have been insufficient, and many digital assets have disappeared. We have established a research project RsDA with libraries, archives, and museums of major universities and research institutes in the Asian region. This paper will introduce the RsDA Inventory, an inventory of online databases related to the Asian region, as a core outcome of the project. We migrated the inventory data to Wikidata throughout the project, and behind that, the guidelines and data models played essential roles. RsDA activities and outcomes will contribute to realizing an open academic information environment and long-term preservation of such information in the Asian region.

Higher education has a central role for nurturing sustainable mindsets for the future well-being of society and the environment. That is why knowledge generation, teaching, and social innovation are the main components of sustainable development goals. In this light, recent research that aims to search for best content and practices in education for sustainability has increasingly focused on the analysis of sustainability coursework, programs, and projects. However, several studies demonstrate the low presence of sustainability contents in higher education curriculum across the world, pointing to an urgent need to integrate sustainability in its varied dimensions (ecological, economic, and social) into the curriculum. In order to address the issues above, this paper will assess the correspondence of sustainability topics of interest for society at large and for university students through the use of text mining techniques. For this analysis two types of textual data were used. The first was extracted from newspaper's articles from the Asahi Shimbun, which is a reference that largely reflects the sustainability views of society. The second was extracted from students' reports written about sustainability during the courses of interdisciplinary sciences of the Liberal Arts and General Education of Kyoto University. Both types of textual data were analyzed and the results were visualized according to the frequency and co-occurrence of appearance of words. The results demonstrate that, after university learning, students became aware of their own individual role in nearby spheres of action. Moreover, the results show that the sustainability views of students and the society partially overlap with different degrees of intensity, from dissimilar contextual backgrounds. Comprehensively, while the university courses further emphasize biocentric and ecocentric views, in contrast, society's views tend to focus on topics related to policy making and the role of enterprises.

Area studies is an interdisciplinary study of the humanities adjacent to various research fields such as social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, medicine, and health. If focusing on humanities sciences, researchers' primary research resources have been text media, such as historical records, literary works, research papers, newspapers, and magazines. Researchers have engaged in analyses by reading the texts carefully as part of their research activities. However, with the spread of the Internet, Web data have become an inevitable source for area studies. We have explored new directions for area studies based on informatics compatible with big data and the Internet age. However, the low accuracy of place name extraction from texts and their place identification on a map hinders text processing, making it impossible to analyze big text data on the Web automatically. Using BiLSTM-CRF and a Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese, our previous study realized approximately 0.9 of BiLSTM-CRF recognition accuracy, which demonstrated the effectiveness of BiLSTM-CRF. Our method could extract place names properly, but not enough to correctly identify their places on the map. Currently, we are trying a simple strategy: We assume that the locations of place names appearing in the same news article are close to each other. Thus, we compute the weighted average of all candidate coordinates of all place names in a news article as the pseudo center, then, as for each place name, choose the coordinate with the shortest distance from the pseudo center. This paper introduces the above methods and results in detail.

This article analyzes land transition in the peripheral areas of Kyoto City during a period of fast economic growth in Japan. Disorganized urban growth during periods of urban transition consumed farmland and forestland, with a lasting impact on the city's environment. The article reports changes in land use and land cover (LULC), population, roads and other transportation infrastructure and the factors behind these changes. The analysis is based on classification of a georeferenced mosaic of black-and-white aerial photos processed with the use of remote sensing technology to reconstruct the city's LULC change for the years 1950 and 1960. This information is complemented by GIS data, and information derived from the consultation of primary and secondary historical sources. The results show that the urbanization patterns in periods of urban transition and economic growth which vary in different parts of the city determine LULC trajectories. Complex factors and mechanisms at the local level shape these dynamics. The article provides insights into the complex socioenvironmental processes that shape urban land systems and how their unforeseen consequences can impact the transition to sustainable cities.

Using archaeological site data for Mainland Southeast Asia, this study aims to develop a knowledge-base and systemize ontology-oriented knowledge for site/artifact data. The description of site/artifact data with metainformation in general is extremely difficult in terms of standardization, and neither effective nor integrated management is possible using relational databases during recording/management, surveying/verification, or publication/feedback. Therefore, using site data (approx. 14,000 data points) on Myanmar, Thailand, and Cambodia, this study is to attempt the structuring/systemization of knowledge through morphological or network analysis of description data, and is to build the knowledge-base ArcOnBase using this structured knowledge. This empirical study will build a knowledge-base, making it possible to search data family that are semantically related in terms, for example, of characteristics and similarities such as regional characteristics and historical investigations, religion, ethnicity, government, and trade, and also includes the capability of accumulating newly derived knowledge. The study will contribute to the formulation of principles for sharing of resources related to cultural asset and heritage information.

Digital gazetteers are essential knowledgebase to associate heterogeneous data sets in the context of geographical proximity. There are some free digital gazetteers containing contemporary Japanese place names but not historical ones. This paper will describe the state of progress of Japanese historical gazetteer databases, and recent developments using semantic Web technologies to prepare for linked open data on cloud environment.

The 6th Global Conference on Health Promotion held in Bangkok in 2005 proposed the following three points as key issues of health promotion in Thailand: (1) make the promotion of health a core responsibility for all government departments, (2) make the promotion of health a requirement for good corporate practice, and (3) make the promotion of health a key focus of communities and civil society. The 7th Global Conference on Health Promotion, held in Kenya in October 2009, reflected the following five sectors for current health promotion in Thailand: (1) community empowerment, (2) health literacy and health behavior, (3) strengthening health systems, (4) partnerships and intersectoral action, and (5) building capacity. As indicated in the Nurses of the Community Project in Thailand, six essential systems were identified to increase involvement and build ownership of the Nurses of the Community program (NOC). Key success, including (1) strong and active memorandum of understanding among key actors at the implementing level, (2) guidelines and strategies to make every system practical, (3) the systems of NOC require intricate designs supported by long-term community-based research and development, and (4) options for policy development at both national and local levels, is vital for NOC retention. In Thailand, the widespread growing interest in strengthening local community infrastructures, institutions, networks, and capacities reflects at least four influencing strategies, which sustain community strength in the country. Based on the Japanese experience, it is expected that these policies and programs will develop in the future into the integrated approach of primary care (by the nurse practitioner), health promotion, national health insurance, and care insurance.

Area studies are interdisciplinary science of humanities, natural and technological researches. Area informatics is a new information paradigm in area studies to integrate and analyze data from variety disciplines quantitatively and objectively. Spatiotemporal data gives a few quantitative attributes that are relatively easy to be derived from area studies' data. The Humanities GIS research group (H-GIS) is a leading joint research group in Japan to apply spatiotemporal informatics to area studies. This paper sums up current situations on area informatics and introduces the H-GIS outcomes about applying spatiotemporal informatics to area studies.

Digital Humanities in Japan has been in progress since an early period. Recently, due to the spread and the development of advanced digital environments, individual humanities researchers are coming to use digital materials in various forms, and according to the continually growing needs of users, cooperation and organization between projects has steadily increased. However, there is some extent to which the large framework known Humanities Computing in Japan has lagged behind in its efforts to develop cooperation with similar projects overseas. Therefore, this panel aims to take a step in the right direction by introducing the origins and current state of Humanities Computing in Japan on digitization by featuring the reflections of the representatives of the projects and organizations that have worked in this area from a relatively early time.

Area informatics is the new paradigm in area studies to facilitate accumulation and creation of knowledge in areas. In the process, a huge variety of databases such as catalogs, archives, full texts, images, movies, sounds, statistics, and so on, are being organized and published on the Web; these will be the sources of area-specific knowledge. However, it is difficult for researchers to find and access appropriate databases to retrieve resources effectively because each database is independent and dispersed on the Web; furthermore, their data structures and retrieval procedures are different. Resource Sharing System, an outcome of area informatics, is an innovative information retrieval system that has been developed to solve such problems. It is a server-side system that hides from users each database system’s particular data structures and retrieval procedures by employing standard metadata and standard retrieval protocols. In this paper, area informatics is introduced through a brief overview of the relationship between area studies and information sciences. After discussing the structure of Resource Sharing System, the new notion of “metadata suites” is introduced and explained. This is a guideline to build databases to be included in Resource Sharing System. Finally, a sample metadata compiled by CIAS is presented and its availabilities discussed.

健康審査(健診)には多数の施設が関わっており,これらの施設の健診情報システム間でデータを交換する必要がある.ところが健診に関わるデータ構造は多様であり,健診依頼元へ検査結果を電子的に還元することすら容易ではない.そこで平成8年より,日本総合健診医学会情報委員会は,健診データの有効利用を図るために日本保健福祉医療情報システム工業会と合同委員会を組織し,標準健診データ交換規約(HDML:Health Data Markup Language)とツールの開発に着手した.HDMLはSGML/XMLを基礎とし,既存の医療情報交換規約との互換性を考慮しつつ,健診に特化したデータ交換規約である.本稿ではHDMLの構造と,HDMLツールを用いた評価試験の結果について述べる.HDMLの導入によりデータ交換にかかわるコストの削減が可能となる.さらにデータ交換の段階でデータ構造が標準化されるため,複数の医療施設で発生した健診データを生涯健康管理データベースとして集積・管理できるようになり,生活習慣病などの予防医学にも大きく貢献することが期待される.

The NIJL has developed variety kinds of databases, i.e., catalogue databases, image databases, movie databases, and full text databases. As these systems have been developed under different backgrounds, users have to learn different command for each database. Furthermore, although some databases have similar contents, users cannot access related information unless they understand NIJL database system well. This paper describes NIJL's new resource sharing system, called “NIJL Collaboration System,” to solve above problems. The “NIJL Collaboration System” is an ongoing project involving data conversion to XML and developing platform independent data manipulation system for a distributed environment. The essential of the project is to introduce XML as a common data description, Dublin Core meta-data as a common access points to databases, and Z39.50 as a common searching protocol. This system enables users to access various sorts of multimedia data in distributed databases on the WEB seamlessly by a single graphical user interface.

本稿では電子資料館プロジェクトを、主にデータ記述の視点から述べる。まず全文テキストデータを形成するために独自に開発されたマークアップ規則(KOKIN)について詳しく述べる。次いで、KOKIN規則に基づいて形成されたテキストをSGMLに基づくテキストに変換する試みについて述べる。最後に、コラボレーションを目指したメタデータとZ39.50によるデータベース統合の試みについて概説する。