Representing Literary Characters and Their Attributes in an Ontology

Abstract

The digital humanities is a burgeoning field of research, bringing computational methods to literary investigations. Ontologies are computational structures that contain descriptions of entities and relations in a domain, and as such they form natural hubs for indexing, search and retrieval as well as enable sophisticated automated inferencing applications. Ontologies are widely used in the medical and biological domains, and are beginning to be adopted in other disciplines such as the social sciences. However, there are unique challenges with the adoption of ontologies for the representation of the elements of literary works. Literary meanings are subjective to some extent, and the ontological mode of being of fictional entities is different from that of the entities in the real world that are the subject matter of the sciences. We focus here on elucidating these challenges through the lens of fictional characters (such as, for example, Macbeth) and the social and personal attributes they are described as having (e.g. age and nationality). We develop a detailed representational strategy – a pattern – for representing fictional characters and their attributes in OWL, in applied ontologies.

Highlights

1. Introduction

  • Ontologies and ontology- based terminologies and indexing vocabularies are widely used throughout the natural sciences, medical and engineering domains [2], but they have not yet seen adoption to the same extent in the social sciences and humanities. One of the possible reasons for this is that the types of entities and relations the social sciences and humanities deal with are more complex, controversial and open to subjective interpretations.
  • In this contribution, we attempt to address the question of how best to represent fictional entities and their attributes. We consider it undesirable to create a parallel hierarchy for fictional attributes which mirrors the hierarchy of attributes which real people can have and are the subject of ontologies in e.g. behavioural science (fictional age vs age as an attribute of people), but we also consider it undesirable to accidentally entail bizarre claims that cross over between the fictional and the real worlds.

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