Restructuring a Taxonomy of Literary Themes and Motifs for More Efficient Querying

Restructuring a Taxonomy of Literary Themes and Motifs for More Efficient Querying We present ongoing work on the restructuring of a taxonomy of literary themes and motifs on the basis of ontology design principles. The original taxonomy is part of a project in which epigraphic texts are tagged with items from the taxonomy, either on a line by line basis or on the basis of whole epigraphs at a time. These tags, then, describe the different themes or motifs that are contained within the text. The taxonomy was originally devised by domain experts and based on long standing traditions in literary analysis. Our work aims to make it easier to query these tagged texts by altering the structure of the taxonomy in order to make it more efficient for querying; while, at the same time, maintaining its ease of use by potential users. First of all we describe some of the features of the original taxonomy that make it difficult to use in querying. We go onto describe how we used principles from ontology design and informatics research to suggest to ameliorate these difficulties, and our efforts to preserve as much of the initial, intuitive, structure as possible. Finally, we discuss further work.