18 Mar 2009

DDBC Time [Chinese calendar] Authority Database
Dharma Drum Buddhist College (DDBC), Taipei, Taiwan.
Supplied note:
"This is to announce the release of our open-source Chinese calendar database.
Computing with Chinese calendar dates, e.g. for use in web-services or for data-mining of classical texts, relies on a robust and trustworthy database. Since some of our projects in the Library and Information Center at Dharma Drum Buddhist College were in need of dynamic conversion of Chinese calendar dates, we looked for such a database. Unfortunately, though numerous conversion tools do exist, we were unable to find an existing dataset that was both openly available and reliable, and therefore had to build our own from scratch,
The DDBC Time Authority Database is based on the Julian Day Number (JDN) format. For conversion into Western dates, we use the proleptic Gregorian calendar with the year 0. The database contains detailed Chinese calendar data from the beginning of the Qin dynasty [16th Nov. 221 BC] to the end of the Qing [18th Jan. 1912 AD - ed.]. Its major purpose is to provide complete Chinese calendar information that can be used by external services and applications. The database is made available as web-service, SQL or CSV dump and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License.
Should you be interested in this please visit http://authority.ddbc.edu.tw/docs/open_content/ for download and documentation.
There is also a web-based query interface that can be used as a standalone service: [at the URL below] - mb."
URL http://authority.ddbc.edu.tw/time/
[The site is primarely in Chinese, with elements of it's interface expressed in English - ed.]
Internet Archive (web.archive.org) [the site was not archived at the time of this abstract]
Link reported by: Marcus Bingenheimer (m.bingenheimer--at--gmail.com), forwarded by h-asia--at--h-net.msu.edu
* Resource type [news - documents - study - corporate info. - online guide]: Study
* Publisher [academic - business - government - library/museum - NGO - other]: Academic
* Scholarly usefulness [essential - v.useful - useful - interesting - marginal]: Essential
* External links to the resource [over 3,000 - under 3,000 - under 1,000 - under 300 - under 100 - under 30]: under 30