Ontological Representations of Narratives: a Case Study on Stories and Actions

In this paper, we describe the narrative ontological model encompassed in the Labyrinth system. The aim of the system is to allow users to explore a digital archive by following the narrative relations among the resources contained in it. Targeted at cultural heritage applications, the Labyrinth project relies on the notion of “cultural archetype”, i.e., a core representation encompassing archetypical stories and characters, exploited as a conceptual framework for the access to archives of heterogeneous media objects. In particular, we describe how the system leverages various types of ontological reasoning to let narrative relations emerge between artworks, and exemplify how these relations are exploited by the system to provide the user with a narrative conceptual framework she or he is familiar with in the exploration of the archive. 1998 ACM Subject Classification H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia