• 1 Nanjing Normal University

The fine traditional culture of the Chinese nation is often embedded in cultural nouns. Building a knowledge base of them helps to better transmit these outstanding cultural heritages and provides support for compulsory education. This paper clarifies the definition of Chinese traditional cultural nouns and selects 3,512 representative nouns of them. Hownet is utilized to categorize these nouns and construct classified thesaurus. Furthermore, using CIDOC-CRM, the interpretations of these nouns are processed, and the associations between different categories of nouns are presented in a knowledge map. On this basis, a knowledge base of Chinese traditional cultural nouns has been constructed. Quantitative analysis of Chinese traditional cultural nouns reveals that the number and difficulty of Chinese traditional cultural nouns to be mastered by students show an increasing trend with the growth of the school year, which is basically in line with the cognitive characteristics of adolescents. This means that the knowledge base constructed based on the digital humanities approach contributes to cultural education at the compulsory level.