Representing narratives in digital libraries: The narrative ontology

Abstract

Digital Libraries (DLs), especially in the Cultural Heritage domain, are rich in narratives. Every digital object in a DL tells some kind of story, regardless of the medium, the genre, or the type of the object. However, DLs do not offer services about narratives, for example it is not possible to discover a narrative, to create one, or to compare two narratives. Certainly, DLs offer discovery functionalities over their contents, but these services merely address the objects that carry the narratives (e.g. books, images, audiovisual objects), without regard for the narratives themselves. The present work aims at introducing narratives as first-class citizens in DLs, by providing a formal expression of what a narrative is. In particular, this paper presents a conceptualisation of the domain of narratives, and its specification through the Narrative Ontology (NOnt for short), expressed in first-order logic. NOnt has been implemented as an extension of three standard vocabularies, i.e. the CIDOC CRM, FRBRoo, and OWL Time, and using the SWRL rule language to express the axioms. On the basis of NOnt, we have developed the Narrative Building and Visualising (NBVT) tool, and applied it in four case studies to validate the ontology. NOnt is also being validated in the context of the Mingei European project, in which it is applied to the representation of knowledge about Craft Heritage.

Digitizing Intangible Cultural Heritage Embodied: State of the Art

“…Also dealing with storytelling in the ICH domain, the Narrative Ontology, or known as NOnt, ofers a modern approach to representing crafts knowledge in the context of the Mingei project. Implemented using OWL 2 DL and SWRL languages, it operates as an extension of the standard vocabularies of CIDOC CRM, FRBRoo, and OWL Time [116].…”

A Representation Protocol for Traditional Crafts

“…The Crafts Ontology (CrO) in [27] is based on CIDOC-CRM [28] and enables the formal representation of crafts. It is an application ontology obtained by integrating several existing ontologies, notably (a) the CIDOC-CRM, a top ontology and an ISO standard forming the conceptual backbone of the CrO, (b) the Narrative Ontology [29,30], a domain ontology for the representation of narratives, (c) the FRBRoo, a domain ontology for bibliographic records, resulting from the harmonization of FRBR with CIDOC-CRM and (d) OWL Time [31], a domain ontology recommended by W3C for the representation of time.…”

Digitisation of Traditional Craft Processes

“…The Mingei Craft Ontology [60] has been developed for the representation of crafts and harmonizes the following ontologies: (a) Narrative Ontology [59], extending the CRM with narratological concepts, (b) FRBRoo, that represents narration structure [22], (c) OWL Time ontology to represent temporal knowledge [42]. The implementation of the ontology is based on Semantic Web standards: (a) RDF as the basic data model for knowledge; (b) OWL 2 DL [54] for axiomatising the represented knowledge; (c) SPARQL [41] as the query language.…”

“…Tool and Product extend E22 Man-Made Object. From [59], we adopt class ActorWithRole (Appendix A, Table 1), which extends E39 Actor and is used to describe the role of a pratictioner in an event. We also adopt MObject from [59] for the representation of media objects, which extends E73 Information Object.…”

“…From [59], we adopt class ActorWithRole (Appendix A, Table 1), which extends E39 Actor and is used to describe the role of a pratictioner in an event. We also adopt MObject from [59] for the representation of media objects, which extends E73 Information Object. Instances of the above classes are used in declarative statements that link them to semantic metadata or media objects.…”