An Ontological Perspective on Thematic Roles

2019

IJMSO

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This paper presents the results of an ontological analysis of collective entities, as an essential step towards the definition of a rich semantic model underlying ontology-driven applications in the historical and Cultural Heritage domains. The major contributions of our proposal are the following: (a) An explicit distinction of contingent and necessary features, that led us to formalize our ontology by means of modal logics. (b) A description of collective entities from a diachronic perspective (thus including singletons and empty collections). (c) An analysis of the inferences enabled by the characterization of collective entities and by the inclusion relationships. (d) A representation of the inclusion relationships that does not imply existential dependence. (e) A distinction between emerging and created collective entities. In the paper, we present an indepth ontological analysis of these aspects and provide a sound formalization for it.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…• HERO-EVENT: It includes classes and properties related to the representation of (historical) events, their typologies, and participation modalities(see [GMR17,GMR18]).…”

Section: The Hero Ontologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Collections revisited from the perspective of historical testimonies

2019

IJMSO

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“…Such different ways of participation in perdurants are represented by thematic roles and are included in HERO-EVENT as subproperties of the hasParticipant property, linking perdurants to objects or set of objects (i.e., hasAgent, hasPatient, hasInstrument, etc.) [20,22].…”

Section: The Ontologies: Hero and Hero-900mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Semantic Web Approach to Enable a Smart Route to Historical Archives

Baldo

2019

JWE

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In this paper we show that an ontology-based approach can be beneficial for enhancing the access to cultural resources, and in particular historical documents. The paper starts with an overview of our approach, aimed at providing online archival systems with a semantic layer based on Semantic Web standards (OWL 2 and RDF). Two projects are introduced, namely Harlock900 and PRiSMHA, carried out in collaboration with local cultural institutions owning rich historical archives. In particular, the paper describes the computational ontologies supporting the approach, and then focuses on two case studies showing that our framework provides better results if compared with standard access systems. The case studies show the enhancement provided by a semantically rich representation of time intervals and a detailed formal description of events and their participants.

“…In this paper, we try to clarify the notion of role in the representation of historical events, by providing an ontological analysis and a formal account of thematic roles, as well as a comparison between thematic and social roles. In the historical domain, in fact, roles are widely used to describe events: Historical texts, as well as multimedia documents (e.g., video, images), are full of expressions that refer to roles, e.g., king, prime minister, leader, conqueror, loser, victim. Starting from the work presented by Goy, Magro, and Rovera (2017), we can identify three different notions that have been called "roles" in the literature, but show a quite different nature:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the role of thematic roles in a historical event ontology

Rovera

2018

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In this paper we discuss the issues related to the formal representation of thematic roles in an ontology modeling historical events. We start by analyzing the ontological distinctions between thematic roles and social roles, which suggest different formal representations. Coupling the study of existing approaches with an analysis of historical texts  available within the Harlock'900 project  we propose a formal representation of thematic roles in HERO (Historical Event Representation Ontology), based on binary properties, directly connecting the event to its participants. Moreover, we show that a fine-grained formal ontological model of participation in (historical) events should include general thematic roles (e.g., agent, patient)  able to capture the common aspects of the ways entities are involved in events  and event-specific roles (e.g., sniper), introduced in the ontology according to a specific criterion, that guarantees the needed expressivity without proliferating roles. We conclude the paper by discussing the benefits of our approach.