Steps Towards a Formal Ontology of Narratives Based on Narratology

Narrative is emerging as a notion that may enable overcoming the limitations of the discovery functionality (only ranked lists of objects) offered by information systems to their users. We present preliminary results on modelling narratives by means of formal ontology, by introducing a conceptualization of narratives and a mathematical expression of it. Our conceptualization tries to capture fundamental notions of narratives as defined in narratology, such as fabula, narration and plot. A validation of the conceptualization and of its mathematical specification is ongoing, based on the Semantic Web standards and on the CIDOC CRM ISO standard ontology

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

AIUCD2016 - Book of Abstracts

Questo volume raccoglie gli abstract dei contributi accolti al convegno AIUCD 2016, dal titolo "Edizioni digitali: rappresentazione, interoperabilità, analisi del testo e infrastrutture" (Digital editions: representation, interoperability, text analysis and infrastructures). Si tratta del quinto convegno dell'Associazione di Informatica Umanistica e Cultura Digitale (AIUCD), tenutosi a Venezia dal 7 al 9 Settembre 2016, che è stato infatti dedicato alla rappresentazione e allo studio del testo sotto vari punti di vista (risorse, analisi, infrastrutture di pubblicazione), con lo scopo di far dialogare intorno al testo filologi, storici, umanisti digitali, linguisti computazionali, logici, informatici e ingegneri informatici. Il presente volume raccoglie dunque gli abstract dei soli interventi accettati al convegno, che hanno ottenuto il parere favorevole da parte di valutatori esperti della materia, attraverso un processo di revisione anonima sotto la responsabilità del Comitato Scientifico di AIUCD 2016