Toward a Semantic Framework for Han Poetry: Multilingual and Decentralized Integration of East Asian Literary Heritage

Han poetry, a classical form composed in literary Chinese, originated in China and spread across East Asia, including Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. It has played a key role in elite education, cultural diplomacy, and political communication. Despite its cultural significance, research on its semantic modeling remains limited, and digital representations often face issues like fragmentation and structural inconsistencies.This paper proposes a decentralized semantic infrastructure for Han poetry as a multilingual resource for cultural heritage. The system is organized into three layers: (1) multilingual SKOS vocabularies to represent poetic concepts; (2) OWL ontologies that reuse BIBFRAME for bibliographic structure and FOAF for authorship representation; and (3) a distributed RDF resource layer supporting SPARQL 1.1 federated queries across poetic corpora.The infrastructure implements TEI standards for structuring poetic materials, including metadata and digitized text, while reserving interfaces for potential IIIF integration. Future work will focus on expanding multilingual vocabularies and integrating with cultural heritage platforms.