Chinese writing system is not only used by Chinese but also used by Japanese. The motivation of this paper is to extend the architecture of Hantology which describes the features of Chinese writing system to integrate Japan Kanji and Chinese characters into the same ontology. The problem is Chinese characters adopted by Japan have been changed, thus, the modification of the original architecture of Hantology is needed. A extended architecture consists orthographic, pronunciation, sense and derived lexicon dimensions. is proposed in this paper. The contribution of this study is that the extension architecture of Hantology provides a platform to analyze the variation of Chinese characters used in Japan. The analytic results of variation for a specific Kanji can be integrated into Hantology, so it is easier to study the variation of Chinese characters systematically

Hantology, a character-based Chinese language resource is created to provide an infrastructure for language processing and research on the writing system. Unlike alphabetic or syllabic writing systems, the ideographic writing system of Chinese poses both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is that a totally different resources structure must be created to represent and process speaker’s conventionalization of the language. The rare opportunity is that the structure itself is enriched with conceptual classification and can be utilized for ontology building. We describe the contents and possible applications of Hantology in this paper. The applications of Hantology include: (1) an account for the diachronic development of Chinese lexica (2) character-based language processing, (3) a study of conceptual structure differences in Chinese and English, and (4) comparisons of different ideographic writing systems.