The Stories Ontology

Working Draft — 16 May 2013

This version:

http://www.contextus.net/stories/ Download

Latest version:

http://www.contextus.net/stories/

Last Update: 2013/05/16 15:26

Authors:

Michael O. Jewell, Paul Rissen, Toby Harris

Copyright © 2010 the authors above.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. This copyright applies to the Stories Ontology and accompanying documentation in RDF. This ontology uses W3C's RDF technology, an open Web standard that can be freely used by anyone.

Status of this Document

This is a work in progress! Comments are very welcome, please send them to mjewell@gmail.com. Thank you.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Stories Ontology at a glance
3. Stories Ontology overview
   1. Example
4. Cross-reference for Stories Ontology classes and properties

Appendixes

1. Normative References
2. Changes in this version (Non-Normative)
3. Acknowledgements (Non-Normative)

1 Introduction

Stories are present throughout our everyday lives and our history: books, film, television, and radio weave events into narrative and plot; myths and legends are passed between generations; news stories describe both ongoing and past events. These stories often share similar themes, characters, items, and locations: by providing an approach to linking these items together, stories can become powerfully navigable, discoverable, and open to new analysis and creation techniques. The Stories ontology was developed in collaboration with the BBC, with an aim to creating an ontology for narrative representation that could be applied across a diverse set of cases. These included accounts of events in Northern Ireland, the storylines of Doctor Who episodes, and key events of the Battle of Britain.

The Stories Ontology is built upon the oft-used Event and Timeline ontologies, thus ensuring interoperability with many existing datasets and allowing for the use of extension ontologies when needed.

2. Stories Ontology at a glance

An alphabetical index of Stories Ontology terms, by class (concepts) and by property (relationships, attributes), is given below. All the terms are hyperlinked to their detailed description for quick reference.

3. Stories Ontology overview

The Story class, intuitively, is the primary class of the ontology. It represents a story that may be conveyed, and provides a set of properties for this purpose. A Story has one or many subject properties, being OWL Things that are the focus of the narrative. In the case of the Battle of Britain this could be the Event of Eagle Day, the concept of Evacuation, or the person of Winston Churchill. Each Story may contain further sub_story properties, providing for a hierarchy when one over-arching story may have several smaller narratives. A Story instance then has an EventList — an ordered list of Events — represented using the Ordered List Ontology. EventSlot is provided to restrict the list to containing Event instances, with the item and slot subclassing those of OLO. Finally, we provide a tells property for OWL Things, which indicates a binding between the item which relates the story and the Story instance. This may be a television programme, movie, book, or painting, for example.

This Ordered List approach is required to allow both the reuse of events and the description of a story flow which is independent of a timeline. This may, for example, be a list of Events in the Battle of Britain ordered by alphabetical location, or a list of Events in a Doctor Who season that the editor has deemed 'scariest'. While the List is non-temporal, the events included in the narrative may well be on a timeline (or many timelines!), and this can be inferred from the events present in the list. This also allows for the list to contain events that are from multiple timelines (e.g. a mashup of two TV episodes); or retellings of the same event with different contexts (e.g. Rashomon). The Ordered list is used to describe the order of 'telling' the story, allowing a linearly based model of comparing and contrasting, for instance.

Also included in the Stories ontology is the Interpretation class. This provides a means to indicate an individual's views of an Event, or indeed any object. Interpretation instances have three key properties: interprets, which refers to the thing that the Interpretation is interpretting; contextualises, a property on an OWL Thing, which places it into the context of a narrative; and asserts — a reference to an Assertion instance. This has a single property, facts, which is a URI to a Named Graph — an RDF document containing triples, found at the end of the web-resolvable URI. We chose to keep these classes simple, and allow for other provenance ontologies to augment them with appropriate properties. For example, the Dublin Core ontologies provide for creator information - which is essential for an Interpretation. The following diagram illustrates this structure as well as how the interpreted Events may be held in a curated list.

3.1. Example

This is a section of an annotated episode of Doctor Who, providing an example of each class present in the Stories ontology.

@prefix :        <http://contextus.net/who/s01e09/> .
@prefix stories: <http://contextus.net/stories> .
@prefix event:   <http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/event.owl#> .
@prefix olo:     <http://purl.org/ontology/olo/core#> .
@prefix dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix tl:      <http://purl.org/NET/c4dm/timeline.owl#> .

@prefix whoc:    <http://contextus.net/who/character/> .
@prefix whol:    <http://contextus.net/who/location/> .
@prefix whoi:    <http://contextus.net/who/item/> .

:world_war_ii { :s01e09_ev12 dcterms:subject <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:World_War_II> . }

<http://contextus.net/who/s01e09/> {

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0074ds9#programme> stories:tells :s01e09.

:s01e09 a stories:Story;
	dcterms:subject <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:World_War_II>;
	stories:events :s01e09_events;
	stories:contextualises :s01e09_int12.
    
# Curated event list

:s01e09_events a stories:EventList;
	stories:slot [
		olo:index 1;
		stories:item :s01e09_ev1
	];
	stories:slot [
		olo:index 2;
		stories:item :s01e09_ev2
	];
	# ... 
	stories:slot [
		olo:index 12;
		stories:item :s01e09_ev12
	];
	# ...


# Events

:s01e09_ev1 a event:Event;
	event:place whol:space;
	event:factor whoi:tardis;
	event:time [ tl:before :s01e09_ev2 ].

:s01e09_ev2 a event:Event;
	event:place whol:tardis;
	event:agent whoc:doctor;
	event:agent whoc:rose_tyler;
	event:time [ tl:after :s01e09_ev1; tl:before :s01e09_ev3 ].

# ... 
    
:s01e09_ev12 a event:Event;
	event:place whol:drinking_den;
	event:agent whoc:doctor;
	event:time [ tl:after :s01e09_ev11; tl:before :s01e09_ev13 ].

# Interpretations

:s01e09_int12 a stories:Interpretation;
	stories:interprets :s01e09_ev12;
	stories:asserts [ stories:facts world_war_ii ].
    

}

      

4. Cross-reference for Stories Ontology classes and properties

A Changes in this version (Non-Normative)

• 2010/09/13: Added overview of the ontology, and included example.

C Acknowledgements (Non-Normative)

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