Steps towards accessing digital libraries using narratives

One of the main problems of the current Digital Libraries (DLs) is the limitation of the informative services offered to the users. Indeed, DLs provide simple search functionalities which return a list of the information objects contained in them. No semantic relation among the returned objects is usually reported which can help the user in obtaining a more complete knowledge on the subject of the search. The introduction of the Semantic Web has the potential of improving the search functionalities of DLs. Many cultural institutions have represented their metadata into formal descriptions encoded by means of formal languages such as RDF and OWL. In this context, the aim of our research is to introduce the narrative as a new search functionality which does not only return a list of objects but 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. The paper presents the first theoretical achievements on a model for representing narratives.