Steps towards a formal ontology of narratives based on narratology

Narrative is emerging as a notion that may enable overcoming the limitations of the discovery functionality (only ranked lists of objects) offered by information systems to their users. We present preliminary results on modelling narratives by means of formal ontology, by introducing a conceptualization of narratives and a mathematical expression of it. Our conceptualization tries to capture fundamental notions of narratives as defined in narratology, such as fabula, narration and plot. A validation of the conceptualization and of its mathematical specification is ongoing, based on the Semantic Web standards and on the CIDOC CRM ISO standard ontology.