With online location-aware smart phones in more and more pockets, storytelling is moving to the streets. Simultaneously, an increasing abundance of Linked Data is being made available, complete with geographical information. In this paper, we review the state of the art and suggest approaches to, and issues with, a storytelling system that combines these two technologies

Hooper, Clare J.

Jewell, Michael O.

English

Southampton (e-Prints Soton)

Linking Locations: Storytelling with Pervasive TechnologyMichael O. JewellDepartment of Electronics and ComputerScienceUniversity of SouthamptonSouthampton, United KingdomSO17 1BJmoj@ecs.soton.ac.ukClare HooperEindhoven University of TechnologyP.O. Box 5135600 MB Eindhovenc.j.hooper@tue.nlABSTRACTWith online location-aware smart phones in more and morepockets, storytelling is moving to the streets. Simultane-ously, an increasing abundance of Linked Data is being madeavailable, complete with geographical information. In thispaper, we review the state of the art and suggest approachesto, and issues with, a storytelling system that combines thesetwo technologies.1. INTRODUCTIONStorytelling has always been part of the way in which peo-ple communicate, but recent technological developments areopening up new ways to engage in this activity. Location-aware technologies are now readily available and in regularuse by many people, opening up increased possibilities forlocation-based storytelling. Recent developments, such asWanderlust Stories1 and Broadcastr2, have begun to bringthis to fruition, but we believe the quantity and structure ofavailable data provides scope for a far richer experience.Writing is subject to inuence (conscious or otherwise) fromall sorts of aspects: past events, locations visited, and peoplemet. An incident in a book or lm may be inspired by anevent from the past, and a line of dialogue may be based onreality. Video games push this further: STALKER is set inChernobyl3; Fallout 34 is based in a post-apocalyptic Wash-ington DC; Grand Theft Auto5 borrows locations generouslyfrom all over America. Locations in- and out-of-game matchalmost exactly: photo-realistically in places. Plot lines andinteractions are drawn on top of the existing canvas of real-ity. These ctions are set in altered realities: in this paperwe ask whether we can build ction altered by reality.1http://wanderluststories.com2http://beta.broadcastr.com3http://www.stalker-videogame.com4http://fallout.bethsoft.com5http://www.rockstargames.com/grandtheftautoTo approach this challenge, it is rst necessary to attaina collection of structured factual data - an area in whichLinked Data shines. Cross-references between dierent datasources provide a vast amount of information, most struc-tured in such a way that there is commonality between con-cepts. There are ontologies for geography, eating establish-ments, people, and even narrative itself. There is an excitingopportunity to combine the huge amount of location dataavailable in Linked Data stores with the events that occurwithin a story, factual or ctional. All that is required isan approach to bridge the device and the content that isintuitive to authors and readers.In this paper we will examine some existing location-awaresystems; describe the Stories Ontology, its current applica-tions, and other useful ontologies; and explore some of thepossibilities that are available by coalescing mobile devices,location data, and narrative.2. LOCATION SYSTEMSWith the introduction of GPS-enabled mobile devices, ge-ographically inspired games and services have become in-creasingly prevalent. The former include games with theaim of discovering new locations, following paths to achievegoals, and competing against friends to `own' geographicalzones. The latter provide facilities to aid in tasks from nd-ing nearby pubs to locating events in the user's vicinity. Allmanner of location-based systems are coming into commonusage, from scavenger hunts to `status-based' social network-ing systems.Informative location-based services are generally orientedaround answering \where's my nearest...?" questions. Forexample, Yelp6 oers listings of local businesses based onone's current location; various applications, including TheWeather Channel's Weather.com application, show local weather;and work has examined location-based services for recom-mending events[4]. Other information-based locational ser-vices focus on information about people who are in tran-sit: for example, Neer7 is concerned with dynamically shar-ing your location with an `inner circle' of family and closefriends.By contrast, Foursquare8 and SCVNGR9 are both exam-6http://www.yelp.com/yelpmobile7http://www.neerlife.com8https://foursquare.com/9http://www.scvngr.com/ples of more `playful' services oriented around `checking in'to a location. Both services have initiated partnerships withpublic and private organisations, building promotions thatencourage their userbase to check into places. Such systems,another example of which is Gowalla10, let people checkinto locations with mobile web apps. Users can see wheretheir contacts have been most recently, post or browse pho-tographs of locations, and see who else is at (or has been at)their location. Some systems have gaming elements: for ex-ample, Gowalla users can nd virtual tokens at some spots,and can collect or swap these. Other such systems includeBrightkite, Hotspot, and Facebook Places.Geocaching11 is an example of locational gaming. It is acollaboratively organised scavenger hunt: people use GPScoordinates and clues given on a website to nd \caches".While the game has clear antecedents in pre-digital treasurehunts, geocaching using GPS began in 2000 after privatecitizens were given access to far more accurate signals thanpreviously, allowing more precise locations to be found. To-day the game revolves around its website, which providesa database of caches and forums for discussion, and thereare several dedicated apps for various mobile phones. Geo-caching has been used in novel ways to tell stories, for ex-ample about the local history of an area, or to engage in actional tale which moves between dierent spots.Broadcastr12 is an example of a dierent kind of location-based system, one which is designed to support storytelling:users can share their memories { or perhaps their ction {about specic locations with an online audience.The majority of these systems operate from their own databasesof locations and metadata, with little overlap between them.This lack of interoperability spawns competition over theaccuracy and quantity of data available to the system: theEiel Tower in a location-aware game may have very dif-ferent metadata to that in a system suggesting sight-seeingopportunities, even though they are both referring to thesame location.3. LINKED DATA RESOURCESFundamental to any locational narrative technology are, nat-urally, geographical resources. GeoNames13 provides an ex-tensive dataset for this purpose, with over 8 million place-names. Their ontology denes the latitude and longitude ofthese places; their spatial relationships to other locations,such as neighbours, contained regions, and regions contain-ing the locations; and data associated with the places, suchas the type of location (e.g. lighthouse, pier, beacon), postalcodes, and related resources in other datasets. GeoNamesalso provides services to look up these places given a longi-tude and latitude.From the GeoNames dataset, one of the most fruitful linksis to DBpedia14. This oers a wealth of data, primarily ex-10http://www.gowalla.com11http://www.geocaching.com12http://beta.broadcastr.com13http://www.geonames.org/ontology14http://dbpedia.orgtracted from structured data on Wikipedia15. In the case ofParis, for example, DBpedia oers information on popula-tion, famous Parisians, campuses, battles, and even precipi-tation! Aside from countries, it also contains information re-garding establishments (e.g. restaurants, churches, libraries,etc). With a little extension, it would be possible to nd allrestaurants in Paris that sold coee.Ontologies, and datasets, are also available for informationabout people. FOAF[1] is the most prevalent, with theFOAF Project commencing in 2000. An instance of theFOAF Person class can include details about names, birth-date, projects, and links to other people - though the latteris only at a high level. Bio16 extends this with events (e.g.Birth, Death) and relationships (e.g. mother, father), andthe Relationship Ontology17 provides more varied relation-ships (e.g. mentor of, would like to know).Finally, to ease the creation of Linked Data-backed stories,there are ontologies for the description of narratives. TheStories Ontology[2][6] is a purposefully light ontology, de-rived from the OntoMedia ontologies for multimedia anno-tation[3]. A Story is dened, at its simplest, as being a setof Events with a subject. These Events, modelled with theEvent Ontology[5], contain information about the people,places, and things involved in the event, and the time atwhich it began/ended. Individuals may then build Interpre-tations of these events, and indicate facts that they believeare asserted as a result of their occurrence.By using the Stories ontology in tandem with existing datasets,it is possible to build a narrative wherein the Events referto people, places, and events that have been previously an-notated. These may be ctional or factual, allowing for anexciting blend of information.4. LOCATION-AWARE NARRATIVEGiven the data described above, it is possible to investigatehow this can inuence generated narrative. Figure 1 showsa potential input structure for such a system. A narrativeusing this structure could portray an event set in a coeeshop, with the protagonist drinking, and the next scene tak-ing place in a nearby church. Using the structure implicitin our Linked Data, we can amend the story based on thereader's location.Figure 1: A possible input structure for a piece ofnarrative.4.1 Class Specialisation15http://www.wikipedia.org16http://vocab.org/bio/0.117http://vocab.org/relationship/Class Specialisation suggests the navigation of the class hi-erarchy downwards, thus reaching concepts which are morespecic than those given as input to the narrative. For ex-ample, if we know that the reader is in a specic coee shop,we can alter the story to give detail based on this informa-tion. Furthermore, we could then apply specialisation toproperties connected to this location, where possible. Fig-ure 2 illustrates the hierarchy within the data (Costa being aCoee Shop that sells Mochas), and how this could alter thedetails in the narrative. The right-hand portion of the gureshows the information attained from data sources (maybe acoee shop-specic source).Figure 2: Figure 1 adapted, given more details aboutthe coee shop.4.2 Class GeneralisationThe inverse of the previous approach, generalisation navi-gates up the class hierarchy. For example, the reader maybe in a location which sells drinks, but is not a Coee Shop(see Figure 3). With a dened maximum distance, the sys-tem could alter the narrative, providing that the requiredproperties still existed at the higher level. As such, a storymay discuss a Restaurant: the location is similar to thatrequired, but tailored to be closer to one pertaining to thereader's location.Figure 3: An example of class generalisation:Restaurant has the same properties as Coee Shopbut is more general, so is a viable candidate whenthe reader is in that location.4.3 Spatial AdaptationMoving away from a single location reference, there is nat-urally a spatial relation between locations in a narrative. Acharacter may travel to a new area, or one may be men-tioned either by a character or a narrative. It might bedescribed relative to a prior location (e.g. nearby, far away,within, containing). All of these relations are described bythe GeoNames ontology, and thus we can use the ideas ofspecialisation and generalisation described above to furtherpersonalise the narrative.For example, a simple case could be `He sat in a restaurantin London.'. If the reader was actually in Newcastle, thecontent could change to `He sat in a restaurant in Newcas-tle.'. After applying class specialisation, it may further alterto `He sat in a pizzeria in Newcastle.'A more complex case could be `He ew to Newcastle Airport,and made his way to the hotel that overlooked the Tyne.'Here two geographical conditions have to hold: the locationof the airport must be near the location of the hotel, whichmust be near the location of the river. By rst generalisingthe classes to `airport', `hotel', and `river', a query couldbe built to retrieve potential options for the personalisednarrative.4.4 Narrative / Spatial FlowThere are some readily apparent issues to building location-inuenced narrative:1. What should be shown if the reader isn't in a suitablelocation?2. What do we do if the reader changes location mid-story?3. Should we expect the reader to move to a new locationto continue a story?The rst case can be handled readily with suitable author-ing: if class generalisation and specialisation cannot amendthe narrative appropriately, the original text can be used. Assuch, it would simply read as a regular, non-personalised,story. It may be that the reader has previously visited asuitable location, in which case this data could be used toensure a coherent thread.This thread may be further disrupted should the readerchange location while reading - especially if stories are gener-ated in sections, rather than in their entirety. One possibilityis to use their initial location throughout, but to provide anoption to `rewrite' the story based on their new position.This could also allow for interesting interactivity options forreaders: they may wish to rewrite their story in a dierentlocation to see how things change.Finally, there is an issue regarding the amount of work re-quired to read a story. Some existing locational games, suchas Wanderlust mentioned earlier, only reveal the next partof the story once the reader is in the correct location. Whilethis adds signicant context to the narrative, it also acts asa block to readers who can't get to these locations. Our ap-proach wouldn't require that the reader move, but it couldallow for more detailed information to be added to the storyif they were in the correct place. As such it is an optionalfeature, which would provide exciting personalisation if thereader would like it, but would not detract from the story ifthe locational data was not available.5. CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSIONIn this paper we have outlined a potential approach to nar-rative personalisation based on locational linked data. Dueto its support for varying levels of detail, it provides a mech-anism which does not place restrictions on the reader, butinstead oers added richness if they wish it to be available.Our use of linked data would remove the need to build dataresources at the time of writing, and instead suggests an in-centive for domain experts to supply their data in machine-readable representations. If their location is available in thisform, it may be placed into a story!Locational storytelling oers the ability to use social infor-mation. How might one's reading of a locational tale changeif friends are involved? One approach could be to make thereader the protagonist, reading the story from a particularcharacter's point of view, while a friend reads the other halfof the story from the perspective of a dierent character. Analternative might be to personalise stories by including rel-evant references to friends. If Alice reads a story set in NewYork and we can see that her Gowalla contact Bill frequentsa cafe featured in the story, we could have the protagonistpass Bill on her way into the cafe. Would changes like thesefacilitate greater reader engagement?The answers to these questions are also coloured by theextent of autonomy given to readers to control characters.For example, authors may wish to let readers inuence thecourse of the story with their location: if the protagonistvisits the church before the coee house, she may not meetthe newspaper salesman who becomes important later on.It is hard to predict whether such changes would increasereader engagement or be perceived as a burden and ignored.Multiplayer interactive ction and group-built roleplayinggames could be a source of inspiration for work in this area,but meanwhile we would like to consider what level of func-tionality everyday technologies support.There are also issues from the authorship perspective. Cre-ating locational narratives requires an additional layer ofsupport: some authors will be happy to explore these tech-nologies without that support, but it is safe to assume thatmany authors would appreciate access to suitable tools. Weneed tools to let authors dene locational variables as wellas to sketch out the overall structure of their tales and putesh on the bones of their narrative. At the time of writing,we are uncertain of what priorities authors would have inthis area, and this is a particularly important question thatwe would like to pursue.The area of locational narratives holds an enormous amountof potential, especially now that relevant technologies are incommonplace use. We believe that this paper has outlinedsome key areas of interest, and hope that it stimulates fur-ther dialogue on suitable next steps.6. REFERENCES[1] D. Brickley and L. Miller. FOAF VocabularySpecication 0.97. Namespace document, January 2010.[2] M. O. Jewell. Semantic screenplays: Preparing tei forlinked data. In Digital Humanities 2010, 2010 2010.Paper presented as part of panel: Scanning Betweenthe Lines: The Search for the Semantic Story Full panelinformation including PDF and XML versions of thepaper available athttp://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/academic-programme/abstracts/papers/html/ab-878.html.[3] K. F. Lawrence, M. O. Jewell, m. c. schraefel, andA. Prugel-Bennett. Annotation of heterogenous mediausing ontomedia. In First International Workshop onSemantic Web Annotations for Multimedia (SWAMM),May 2006.[4] D. Quercia, N. Lathia, F. Calabrese, G. D. Lorenzo, andJ. Crowcroft. Recommending social events from mobilephone location data. In ICDM, pages 971{976, 2010.[5] Y. Raimond and S. Abdallah. The event ontology,2007. http://motools.sf.net/event.[6] P. Rissen. Re-imagining the creative and culturaloutput of the bbc with the semantic web. In DigitalHumanities 2010, 2010 2010.

Linking Locations: Storytelling with Pervasive Technology

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