Normalization of kinship relations to enrich family network analysis: case study on China biographical database.

This article focuses on normalizing complex kinship relations in pre-modern Chinese historical data to enable accurate family network construction and analysis. Using the China Biographical Database (CBDB), which contains over 484,000 kinship instances expressed by more than 400 kinship words, the authors propose reducing these diverse kinship terms to three basic relations—father–descendant, mother–descendant, and husband–wife—along with gender information. Through normalization, error detection, correction, and logical inference, they identified 178,390 basic kinship relations, inferred 5,805 missing persons, and generated 29,423 family trees, allowing quantitative analysis of family sizes, depths, remarriage patterns, and inter-family marriages in ancient China. The study demonstrates that such normalization is essential for constructing coherent family networks from historical kinship data and facilitates deeper historical and social research.