Leveraging a narrative ontology to query a literary text

In this work we propose a model for the representation of the narrative of a literary text. The model is structured in an ontology and a lexicon constituting a knowledge base that can be queried by a system. This narrative ontology, as well as describing the actors, locations, situations found in the text, provides an explicit formal representation of the timeline of the story. We will focus on a specific case study, that of the representation of a selected portion of Homer's Odyssey, in particular of the knowledge required to answer a selection of salient queries, formulated by a literary scholar. This work is being carried out within the framework of the Semantic Web by adopting models and standards such as RDF, OWL, SPARQL, and lemon among others.