StoryTeller: An event-based story ontology composition system for biographical history

Abstract

In this paper, we overview some of the Semantic Web-related technologies and describe a cognitive knowledge structure for biographical knowledge representation based on OWL markup language, we call it BKOnto. We all know that information management is becoming an important part of digital world, ranging from the management of personal collections to the construction of diversified, distributed, semantic databases. These semantic databases can be addressed or described, to some extent, using “Semantic Web” technologies, allowing to create a machine understandable web of data. The BKOnto is a formal framework for dealing with information about biographical history on the semantic web, including biographical events, temporal and spatial relationships, related information of persons, and so on. We describe this ontology knowledge structure in detail, and explain how BKOnto can act as a basis for more domain-specific knowledge representation. In BKOnto, we use the OWL markup language to define the main structures of the biographical knowledge: the StoryLine of the biography and the historical Event of the biography. The so-called biography story line, StoryLine, is used as a superstructure to organize a number of biographical historical events, which can be used to describe biography for a specific character. The biographical historical event is the basic unit of our OWL ontology which is based on the historical data to create content description and related space-time factor description. The design of BKOnto is to organize StoryLine and Event as the basis for the knowledge structure. In the ontology knowledge construction system design, we will follow this ontological architecture for development.In accordance with this ontology knowledge cognitive architecture design, we also developed an ontology knowledge construction system, StoryTeller, using BKOnto as the main body. The StoryTeller system can be used to organize pieces of knowledge in biographical history and to form a complete biographical story. A story line with multiple event units will be able to present rich historical event information with relevant temporal and spatial factor. In addition, based on the idea of supporting the digital library and digital archive systems, the StoryTeller system also provide the link capability for the event units to correlate to the contents of external digital library/archive systems so that more diverse digital collections can be presented in StoryTeller system. In this study, we use the Mackay Digital Collection Project Platform (http://dlm.csie.au.edu.tw/), which i s a digital library system of George Mackay's historical collections, as information source to demonstrate the ontology knowledge construction process of the Mackay biography.