Ontologies for the metadata annotation of stories

Semantic web and ontology technologies offer cultural heritage the conceptualization of a number of domains of interest. A relevant issue in the annotation of digital heritage is the abstraction of concepts that underlie a number of cultural heritage items, conceived for different media, in libraries and collections. This is the case for a category we call dramatic items, expressed in a large number of media (e.g., novels, screenplay, stage performance, videogames, audiovisuals, the latter including feature films, TV series, music videoclips). The primary notion of story underpins the dramatic media. This paper presents an ontology for the representation of the story elements in media heritage. Story elements are employed to describe the dramatic qualities (e.g., the agents or characters of a story, their goals, their conflicts), abstracting from the specific media in which they appear. An annotation schema derived from the ontology was employed in a web platform for the annotation of the dramatic metadata on the digital heritage items (in textual and audiovisual form). Formal reasoning on the metadata representation points out a number of issues that are of interest for scholars and enthusiast of the drama cultural heritage, so are useful in research, teaching, and fruition.