A Flexible Framework for the Creation of Narrative-Centered Tools

To better support the creation of narrative-centered tools, developers need a flexible framework to integrate, catalog, select, and reuse narrative models. Computational models of narrative enable the creation of software tools to aid narrative processing, analysis, and generation. Narrative-centered tools explicitly or implicitly embody one or more models of narrative by their definition. However, narrative model creation is often expensive and difficult with no guaranteed benefit to the end system. This paper describes our preliminary approach towards creating the SONNET narrative framework, a flexible framework to integrate, catalog, select, and reuse narrative models, thereby lowering development costs and improving benefits from each model. The framework includes a lightweight ontology language for the definition of key terms and interrelationships among them. The framework specifies model metadata to allow developers to discover and understand models more readily. We discuss the structure of this framework and ongoing development incorporating narrative models.