[foaf-dev] Fictional stuff

[Nick Gibbins]

Simon Reinhardt wrote:
> Dan Brickley wrote:
>> Pretty much the same approach. FOAF sounds somewhat more liberal though, 
>> as it admits fictional people. So you could use it for example when 
>> describing characters in a drama - this was done for example in the SUDS 
>> experiments by BBC people, modelling Eastenders. See also 
>> http://www.r4isstatic.com/?p=18 for more discussion.
> 
> Speaking of which: does anyone know if there are any vocabularies that model fiction? Fictional universes, places, times, characters? Structure of fictional narration?
> I think it's worth having those as classes of their own. Especially characters deserve a special treatment I think. According to Wikipedia [1]: "A character is any person, persona, identity, or entity that exists in a work of art. The process of conveying information about characters in fiction is called characterisation. Characters may be entirely fictional or based on real, historical entities. Characters may be human, supernatural, mythical, divine, animal, or personifications of an abstraction."
> So I would say the character John Malkovich in "Being John Malkovich" is a separate entity from the real-life person John Malkovich. This enables you to describe the special characteristics given to him in the film and to describe his actions in it without implying that the real person did that.
> I've done some initial work on that sort of thing. I was just wondering if there is any existing stuff before pursuing it.

One of our postgrads (Faith Lawrence) produced such an ontology (OntoMedia) as 
part of her PhD a few years ago - her thesis is available at 
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14704/

-- 
Dr Nicholas Gibbins                                     nmg at ecs.soton.ac.uk
Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia Group     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~nmg/
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