This paper examines the 1744 Gapja Jinyeon (甲子進宴), recorded in the Gapja Jinyeon Uigwe (『(甲子)進宴儀軌』), not simply as a celebration of the twentieth year of King Yeongjo’s reign, but as a ritual-political event that publicized the completion of Gukjo Sok Oryeui (『國朝續五禮儀』, the revised state ritual code, hereafter Sok Oryeui). Rather than treating the compilation and the banquet as separate developments, this study explores how they can be modeled as semantically synchronized: coordinated in time, space, and personnel to construct a political narrative presenting Yeongjo as a monarch who had “perfectly equipped law and ritual,” despite lingering doubts about his legitimacy and the factional fragmentation following the 1721–22 Literati Purges (Sinim Oksa). A close examination of the tightly clustered sequence—August, the completion report of Sok Oryeui; October, the Gapja Jinyeon; November, the royal declaration; and December, Sok Daejeon (『續大典』)—suggests the contours of a deliberately coordinated political program.

The 1744 banquet was grounded in a genealogy of earlier ritual models. The 1713 Jonsung Dogam Uigwe (『尊崇都監儀軌』) provided the institutional blueprint for honorific title ceremonies later codified in the Sangjonho Chaekbo-ui section of Sok Oryeui. The 1719 Gihae Jinyeon Uigwe (『(己亥)進宴儀軌』) and Gihae Gisagyecheop (『己亥耆社契帖』) developed a textual–visual documentation system for royal banquets, shaping how performances were recorded and remembered. During the 1740 Gyeongsin Cheobun, Yeongjo revived and reorganized these precedents through Chinrim Jeonhyangchuk-ui (親臨傳香祝儀) and Sangjonho Chaekbo-ui (上尊號冊寶儀), two ritual protocols later incorporated into Sok Oryeui, reinforcing his authority through ritual restructuring at a moment of political instability. Existing scholarship on royal banquets, banquet paintings, and ritual politics provides an important foundation for this study (Park 2025; Jeong 1997; Lim 2017; Shim 2021; Yoo 2021). Building on these insights, this research extends the analysis by examining how ritual performance and legal codification may be understood as integrated within a coordinated political framework culminating in 1744.

This modeling process is grounded in historical interpretation: before technical implementation, the ritual sources must first be read as event units, relational categories, and evidential layers. To formalize these interpretive units, this project adopts the Encyves methodology, a semantic curation framework developed in Korean digital humanities projects (Kim 2024; Seo 2024). Encyves emphasizes preserving semantic context—the meaningful relationships among entities—rather than merely aggregating digital objects. Drawing on CIDOC-CRM–inspired ontological structures, this study uses EKCD as the active TBox for the Sok Oryeui ABox, while preserving conceptual continuity with the institutional EKC ontology (Center for Digital Humanities 2023; 2026; Seo 2026). The ABox combines EKCD and standard properties such as ekcd:isHeldAt, ekcd:depicts, ekcd:isPreviousInSequenceTo, and dcterms:isPartOf to connect events, places, paintings, and textual albums. By making these encyclopedic nodes, relationship types, and source-based pathways explicit, the model supports re-curation, cross-source interpretation, and the reconstruction of royal rituals as multi-dimensional networks rather than linear textual sequences.

The pilot focuses on the 1740 ritual precedents—Chinrim Jeonhyangchuk-ui and Sangjonho Chaekbo-ui—as the normative foundation for Sok Oryeui. The workflow proceeds in four stages: source-based entity extraction, ontology-guided relationship modeling, ABox construction in RDF/Turtle, and visualization. (1) Entity identification isolates core elements: approximately fifty officials with rank and, where possible, factional affiliation; key ritual and administrative spaces such as palace halls, Jongmyo, and banquet venues; events including the 1721–22 Literati Purges, Gyeongsin Cheobun, compilation milestones, and ritual performances; and material objects such as vessels, banners, costumes, and ceremonial implements. (2) Relationship modeling defines core links—Event → held_at → Place; Painting → depicts → Event; Painting → isPartOf → Text/Album; Event → isPreviousInSequenceTo → Event—while allowing future extension to person-event roles such as officiated, recited, presented, and observed. (3) Semantic structuring organizes entities and relations into a knowledge graph enabling cross-reference of ritual precedents (1713, 1719, 1740, 1744), queries across document–person–space–event pathways, and reconstruction of contextual meaning not readily visible in textual summaries. (4) Visualization layers translate this structure into interpretable visual forms.

Four pilot visualizations illustrate the potential of this approach. (A) A temporal synchronization timeline (Fig. 1) shows how compilation, declaration, and banquet performance were clustered to form an integrated narrative of authority.

Figure 1. TimelineJS-based temporal synchronization of the 1744 Gapja Jinyeon corpus.

(B) A filtered semantic knowledge graph (Fig. 2) links ritual events to performance sites, documentary paintings, and source albums, suggesting how royal banquet performance can be understood as embedded in an integrated structure of spatial staging, visual recording, and textual transmission.

Figure 2. Knowledge graph of ritual staging and visual documentation, 1719–1744 (yEd).

(C) A projected network analysis of ritual personnel maps officials associated with the 1740 rituals and the 1744 banquet. The resulting networks visualize personnel continuity, factional balancing, and selective inclusion strategies, offering an additional analytical perspective on Yeongjo’s long-term legitimacy politics discussed in earlier scholarship (Park 2025; Jeong 1997; Shim 2021). (D) A spatial reconstruction layer uses seating charts (jwacha, 坐次) from Gisagyeonghoecheop (『耆社慶會帖』) to digitally restore spatial hierarchy. By linking individuals to their positions, the model reveals sight lines and visual hierarchies centered on the king, clarifying how spatial arrangement communicated political authority to assembled officials.

This pilot demonstrates that semantic modeling can reveal interpretive patterns not easily articulated in text alone: the synchronization of political and ritual events; the relational structure of ritual personnel; and the spatial logic through which royal authority was publicly staged. Methodologically, it offers an extensible Encyves-based workflow for East Asian ritual history. Substantively, it offers a model for examining how compilation, legislation, and ritual performance may have been brought together within a single political theater in 1744. Future work will extend the model to encompass the full set of ritual protocols (uiju, 儀註) recorded in the 1744 Sok Oryeui and develop a public semantic archive for research and education.

This study was developed through interdisciplinary collaboration between Su-jeong Park, who led source curation and historical interpretation, and Dong Shin Seo, who led ontology modeling, implementation, and workflow design.