We claim in this paper that “context” is a key design concept for stimulating people’s mind to discover new interpretations and understandings in the digital archive. Our approach to the notion of context is unique in terms of the proposal of the model of context from the viewpoint of database systems and informatics. We assume that content is actually comprised by two basic elements, namely context-free content and context-sensitive content, of which the latter is usually neglected in traditional database systems. We further propose that the context-sensitive part can be further decomposed into two elements, namely relationship and arrangement. Then we discuss some examples about how we can reformulate the context using various operations, and this arguments leads to the new line of database design, namely context-based database systems with the new design of a query language. Finally we introduce our ongoing digital archiving project called Toyo Bunko Image and Manuscript Database, and introduce some technical challenges in this digital archive with future plans.

      @InProceedings{ kyso:dsr03,
      author = {Asanobu KITAMOTO and Takeo YAMAMOTO and Sonoko SATO and Kinji ONO},
      title = {Reformulation of Contexts: A Design Concept for the Database of DSR Archive},
      booktitle = {Proceedings of the Nara Symposium for Digital Silk Roads},
      pages = {319-330},
      year = 2003,
      month = 12,
      doi = {},
      note = { (in English)},
      }