Ontologies for the metadata annotation of stories

Abstract

Semantic web and ontology technologies offer cultural heritage the conceptualization of a number of domains of interest. A relevant issue in the annotation of digital heritage is the abstraction of concepts that underlie a number of cultural heritage items, conceived for different media, in libraries and collections. This is the case for a category we call dramatic items, expressed in a large number of media (e.g., novels, screenplay, stage performance, videogames, audiovisuals, the latter including feature films, TV series, music videoclips).The primary notion of story underpins the dramatic media. This paper presents an ontology for the representation of the story elements in media heritage. Story elements are employed to describe the dramatic qualities (e.g., the agents or characters of a story, their goals, their conflicts), abstracting from the specific media in which they appear. An annotation schema derived from the ontology was employed in a web platform for the annotation of the dramatic metadata on the digital heritage items (in textual and audiovisual form). Formal reasoning on the metadata representation points out a number of issues that are of interest for scholars and enthusiast of the drama cultural heritage, so are useful in research, teaching, and fruition.

Ontology–Based Visualization of Characters’ Intentions

“…For example, the writing assistant Dramatica Pro 3 visualizes the building blocks of a plot structure, with diagrams for plot progression and story points, that helps the writer in controlling and balancing the tension within the story development. Some works [14,13], propose the metadata annotation of dramatic heritage items, assuming an ontological approach (ontology called Drammar) to the representation of the drama elements, encoding the widely acknowledged relationship between the drama abstraction and one of the concrete shapes a drama can assume [19, p. xviii]. There exist other approaches that guide the annotation for the formal encoding of the drama elements.…”

“…The ontology Drammar (encoded in the OWL2 RL language) has been designed with the twofold goal of providing a formalized conceptual model of the dramatic elements [2,13,14], and an annotation schema for encoding the description of a dramatic item. So, along with classes that represent the domain of drama, it contains specific classes that are intended for interfacing the representation of drama with linguistic and common sense knowledge.…”

Coupling conceptual modeling and rules for the annotation of dramatic media

“…The mapping rules were devised with the aim of allowing a support for drama scholars based on the explicitation of character's intentions connected to the unit (a visualization interface provide immediate access to such information, see [65,64]). The reasoning that we want to achieve by using this set of rules is that one of obtaining a recognition of equality between the actions (incidents) occurring in the unit, and the action in plans, according to some shared properties such as the fact that such actions are represented by the same Schema with the same Roles and Fillers.…”

“…We describe a formal ontology of the drama domain, called Drammar, and its integration with a rule components (based on DL-safe SRWL rules), that augments the representation encoded in the ontology with further information obtained through automatic reasoning. In this paper, we describe this approach by resorting to the conceptual framework of drama annotation: after a semiautomatic annotation of some dramatic qualities (through a web-based platform for the annotation of dramatic media [64]), the rule component augments the obtained representation by inferring further dramatic qualities through reasoning.…”

“…In addition, new forms of drama have leveraged a number of AI techniques, with the devise of machine readable representations of drama and the automation of a number of dramatic functions [70,82,100,88]. Finally, the quest for the massive access to digital (dramatic) media has spawned the issue of the metadata annotation, which is necessary for the indexing, retrieval, and presentation of media items, with the appearance of models and applications in both the research and production communities [34,64,61].…”