Interoperable Performance Research: Promises and Perils of the Semantic Web

Abstract

The semantic web is a family of web technologies that allow users to tag and retrieve resources (such as images, videos, and texts) in complex ways. Could theatre and performance research become more “international” if performance data (i.e., academic articles and multimedia corpora) could be freely accessed and combined by anyone with an internet connection? Open access policies and semantic web technologies could allow any resource to be tagged and linked together from a multiplicity of perspectives, requiring complex institutional changes that are probably neither feasible nor desirable.

The ontology of drama

“…A relevant contribution in this sense is provided by the narrative ontology proposed by Ciotti (2016): mainly based on the tradition of semiotic and structuralist narratology, it contains key notions such as Actant, Action, and Actor. The use of the computational ontology format not only allows the encoding of the conceptual model of drama in a formal, unambiguous way, as called for by Varela (2016), but also makes the knowledge about drama both available as a vocabulary for the interchange of annotations across different projects and readily usable as a representational tool for applications that process and manipulate these annotations in automatic ways. Benefits of annotation range from the possibility of detecting and measuring regularities in drama, useful for comparative studies, to the automatic generation of drama, which may leverage annotated corpora to combine dramatic elements into new objects according to the formal model of drama expressed in the ontology.…”

“…Resources of this kind are claimed to be of great importance for the researchers in the digital humanities: as discussed by Varela (2016), the notion of theatre and drama does not manifest in an item or an event sufficiently unified and standardized to be represented via a conventional database. Semantic web technologies, and ontologies in particular, are suitable to represent performance interpretations through the possibility of sharing the terminology through several approaches and the possibility for instances to belong to multiple classes scattered through several ontologies, though maintaining the original meaning cross-culturally.…”