Abstract: 【Purpose/significance】The "14th Five-Year Plan for Water Culture Construction" points out that "promoting the deep inte⁃ gration of water conservancy projects and culture". With unique engineering characteristics, water engineering cultural heritage con⁃ tains rich water culture connotation. The excavation and protection of it is conducive to improving the public awareness of water engi⁃ neering and enhancing national cultural self-confidence.【Method/process】In view of the characteristics of abstraction and limited ac⁃ cessibility of water engineering cultural heritage, there are some problems in the current water engineering cultural heritage, such as low public understanding, single display form and in-depth experience, which seriously hinder the extensive dissemination and sys⁃ tematic inheritance of water engineering cultural heritage. Therefore, in order to serve the dissemination and inheritance of water engi⁃ neering cultural heritage, this paper takes the effective organization of its resources as the starting point, and constructs the knowledge map of water engineering cultural heritage in a top-down way. Combined with this knowledge map, a knowledge question and answer system with user interaction as the core is designed to continuously deepen the understanding and dissemination in the way of question and answer, so as to promote the continuous inheritance and utilization of water engineering cultural heritage.【Result/conclusion】 This paper takes the Jiangsu section of the Grand Canal as an application example to deepen the excavation and utilization of water en⁃ gineering cultural heritage construction with rivers as the link.【Innovation/limitation】The next step will be to integrate the open source large language model to better achieve multi-round question answering,optimize multi-task question answering, and improve the quality of answers.