Ontological Representations and Narrative:

A Case Study in Cultural Heritage

Antonio Lieto (work with Rossana Damiano)

Università di Torino (Italy)

Dipartimento di Informatica

IAOA Design Semantics Workshop, Bari, 30th June – 2nd July 2014.

Focus

- The work I am presenting has been developed within the Labyrinth Project (P.I. Rossana Damiano), supported by Regione Piemonte, Polo di Innovazione per la Creatività Digitale e la Multimedialità, 2012-2014.

- Application of Ontology-based representations for designing narrative navigation of artifacts in digital archives.

Outline

- Introduction and Motivation - Overview of the System «Labyrinth»

- Ontological Model in Labyrinth

- Narrative reasoning

- Conclusions

Problem and Motivation

Problem: exploration of digital archives of heterogeneous items (example). Proposed approach: narrative as access key to items for cultural heritage exploration. Exploration of digital, multimedia archives, through a narrative based model based on stories and actions. - Cross-exploration of items (heterogeneous formats) - Semantic based access to the archival information

(semantics provided by an ontological model).

Labyrinth Intro

- Labyrinth allows the user to explore a repository

of media resources through the mediation of an ontology encoding a conceptual model of narrative elements.

- Ontological Model in Labyrinth (stories, actions,

characters etc.).

- Examples of Narrative reasoning.

Labyrinth Architecture

Archetype Ontology

Main classes of the Ontology (ontology aligned with the ISO-Standard CIDOC-CRM ontology):

- Archetypes (thematic “filters”, p.o.v.)

- Stories

- Actions

- Characters

- Roles

Story in Lab. Ontology (Story-substory)

SubStory/PartOf SubStory/PartOf

Narrative Reasoning

Killing_ the_Minotaur Giving_the_Thread

hasAction hasAction

hasAction hasAction

Transfer of narrative aspects to artifacts via Rules:

Artifact(?a), describesStory(?a, ?s), hasStoryPart(?s, ?s1), hasAction(?s1, a1) -> hasAction(?a, ?a1)

Substory Substory

Ontological Reasoning

hasTimePeriod

type Inference 1: 1935 belongs to ModernPeriod

Inference 2: The item is a Modern Artifact

Archetype choice

Narrative category choice

Labyrinth Interface: Story based exploration

SUBSTORY

INHERITED ACTIONS

Labyrinth Interface: Action based exploration

ITEMS

Belongs to Collections

Related Characters Related Stories

NARRATIVE INFO

Labyrinth: ex. Interaction Design

Objects, Locations

...

characters

Systems comparison based on narrative elements

Legend: x = available element no = not available element

Upshots

• Ontological modelling of narrative aspects used in the Labyrinth system provides, through some simple forms of automatic reasoning processes, useful insights on the relations occurring among items shared in a digital archive.

• Extended narratives aspects considered through the ontological model.

Current work

• User study (results in next 2 months).

Goal evaluation: can this kind of tools supports serendipity processes, be used as a new learning experience etc. ?

Thanks for your attention !!!

Discussion/Comments

lieto@di.unito.it

SIG IAOA Design Semantics Workshop, Bari.