Formal Components of Narratives

One of the main problems of the current Digital Libraries (DLs) is the limitation of the informative services offered to the users, who express their queries in natural language. Indeed, DLs provide simple search functionalities that return a list of the information objects contained in them. No semantic relation among the returned objects is usually reported, which could help the user in obtaining a more complete knowledge on the subject of the search. The introduction of the Semantic Web, and in particular of the Linked Data, has the potential of improving the search functionalities of DLs. In this context, our final aim is to introduce the narrative as new first-class search functionality. As output of a query, the new search functionality does not only return a list of objects but it also presents a narrative, composed of events that are linked to the objects of the library and endowed with a set of semantic relations connecting these events into a meaningful semantic network. This paper presents a study of the Artificial Intelligence literature, especially of the Event Calculus theory, in order to identify the formal components of narratives. Furthermore, the mapping between these components and the standard ontology CIDOC CRM is presented, in order to evaluate if it could be taken as reference vocabulary to create an ontology for narratives. On the top of this ontology, we will develop the new search functionality for DLs.