Constructing narratives using NBVT: a case study

Narratives are a fundamental part of human life, starting from the epic poems of the ancient past to modern films. Since the 1970s, much research has been carried out to study the computational representation of narratives. Up to now, there is no standard definition of narrative. In our research, we intend narratives as networks of events defined by a narrator, endowed with participating entities (e.g. persons, location, time) and semantic relations. In this paper, we introduce the Narrative Building and Visualising Tool (NBVT), a semi- automatic software based on a formal ontology for narratives we developed. The tool allows users to construct and visualise narratives using Wikidata as reference knowledge base and Europeana for enriching the narrative with digital objects. As case study, we present the narrative of the life of the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt created using NBVT. Since Wikidata is not event-based, our efforts focus on the automatic extraction from Wikidata of the implicit events that compose the narrative. Furthermore, we developed a dedicated functionality in NBVT that finds the Europeana digital objects related to a particular event. This functionality matches the metadata of Europeana digital objects with the event and the participating entities using a similarity algorithm.