A Flexible Framework for the Creation of Narrative-Centered Tools

To better support the creation of narrative-centered tools, developers need a flexible framework to integrate, catalog, select, and reuse narrative models. Computational models of narrative enable the creation of software tools to aid narrative processing, analysis, and generation. Narrative-centered tools explicitly or implicitly embody one or more models of narrative by their definition. However, narrative model creation is often expensive and difficult with no guaranteed benefit to the end system. This paper describes our preliminary approach towards creating the SONNET narrative framework, a flexible framework to integrate, catalog, select, and reuse narrative models, thereby lowering development costs and improving benefits from each model. The framework includes a lightweight ontology language for the definition of key terms and interrelationships among them. The framework specifies model metadata to allow developers to discover and understand models more readily. We discuss the structure of this framework and ongoing development incorporating narrative models

A Wikidata-Based Tool for the Creation of Narratives

This thesis presents the results of a 12-month-long internship in the Digital Libraries group of the NeMIS laboratory of ISTI-CNR. The focus of the internship was the development of a semi-automated tool for representing narratives in a digital library. This work is part of a larger research effort on the representation of narratives through Semantic Web technologies, including the development of an Ontology of Narratives based on the CIDOC CRM reference ontology. The tool which is presented in this thesis is composed of a web interface which allows the user to create a narrative starting from a specific subject, a triplification component to trasform the inserted knowledge into the OWL language, and several visualization components. The tool is based on the Ontology of Narratives, of which it is the first application, and also on Wikidata, an open collaborative knowledge base of recent development, whose entities are imported in the tool in order to facilitate the data insertion by the user. This thesis also reports the challenges that were encountered in the development of a mapping between the CIDOC CRM and Wikidata ontologies. The tool is the first application to make use of the Ontology of Narratives, and will allow an evaluation of it through the representation of a case study, the biography of Dante Alighieri, the famous Italian poet of the late Middle Ages