Using semantic story maps to describe a territory beyond its map

Abstract

The paper presents the Story Map Building and Visualizing Tool (SMBVT) that allows users to create story maps within a collaborative environment and a usable Web interface. It is entirely open-source and published as a free-to-use solution. It uses Semantic Web technologies in the back-end system to represent stories through a reference ontology for representing narratives. It builds up a user-shared semantic knowledge base that automatically interconnects all stories and seamlessly enables collaborative story building. Finally, it operates within an Open-Science oriented e-Infrastructure, which enables data and information sharing within communities of narrators, and adds multi-tenancy, multi-user, security, and access-control facilities. SMBVT represents narratives as a network of spatiotemporal events related by semantic relations and standardizes the event descriptions by assigning internationalized resource identifiers (IRIs) to the event components, i.e., the entities that take part in the event (e.g., persons, objects, places, concepts). The tool automatically saves the collected knowledge as a Web Ontology Language (OWL) graph and openly publishes it as Linked Open Data. This feature allows connecting the story events to other knowledge bases. To evaluate and demonstrate our tool, we used it to describe the Apuan Alps territory in Tuscany (Italy). Based on a user-test evaluation, we assessed the tool’s effectiveness at building story maps and the ability of the produced story to describe the territory beyond the map.