To illuminate the human relationships about Japanese Buddhism in the 8-14th century (Heian and Kamakura Periods), the researchers on Japanese literature, history and Buddhism are collaborating with each other. The literatures frequently used by the researchers are genealogical tables of master-pupil relationship in each denomination, as well as those of blood relationship. But then it is troublesome to find the person by turning over pages and might be overlooked. Therefore we have attempted to implement a search and visualization system of genealogies which supports humanities researchers without good command of computers.
We have already implemented such a system using a relational database for data storage and several Java applications for visualization. The Java-based visualization adopted JTree class which enabled us to promote the visualization readily. Although those applications supply a powerful, accessible feature for browsing around genealogical tables, such displayed windows are inferior to the genealogical tables in print, since it is impossible for those applications to display the non-standardized characters for example.
Now we improve the system in which the visualization feature is replaced with SVG-based one while the database is unchanged. The visualization using SVG has a number of advantages. Firstly, by embedding the glyphs in the SVG image, non-standardized characters could be expressible. Secondly, the names would be written vertically in the genealogical tables, just as paper. Thirdly, also similar to paper, subscripts for the persons' properties could be indicated in concurrence with the names. And finally, the genealogical table might not be required to make a tree structure but a graph (or network) structure would be acceptable.
We actually implement the SVG-based genealogy browser by means of CGI programs in Ruby, which generates the genealogical table with a central focus on the provided name of a person. The table displays both the names and the properties for vertical writing. When clicking a name in the table, one can find the SVG image with the specified person centered. Moreover, icons can be appended for exploring any other genealogical table in which the person lies.