Introducing narratives in Europeana: A case study

Abstract

We present a preliminary study to introduce narratives as a first-class functionality in digital libraries. The general idea is to enrich those libraries with semantic networks of events providing a meaningful contextualisation of the digital libraries’ objects. More specific motivations are presented through a set of use cases by different actors who would benefit from using narratives for different purposes. Then, we consider a specific digital library, Europeana, the largest European digital library in the cultural heritage domain. We discuss how the Europeana Data Model could be extended for representing narratives, and we introduce an ontology for narratives. We also present a semi-automatic tool, which, on the basis of the ontology, supports the creation and visualisation of narratives, and we show how the tool has been employed to create a narrative of the life of the painter Gustav Klimt as a case study. In particular, we focus our attention on the functionality of the tool that allows extracting and proposing to the user specific digital objects for each event of the narrative.

Keywords

• digital libraries
• narratives
• europeana
• ontologies