Using Formal Narratives in Digital Libraries

Currently, Digital Libraries (DLs) provide simple search functionalities to respond to the user's queries, which return a ranked list of the resources included in the DLs. No semantic relation among the returned objects is usually reported that could help the user to obtain a more complete knowledge on the subject of the search. The introduction of the Semantic Web and in particular of the Linked Open Data has the potential of improving the search functionalities of DLs. In this context, the long-term aim of our study has been to introduce the narrative as new first-class search functionality of DLs. We intend narratives as semantic networks of events that are linked to the objects of the DLs and are endowed with a set of semantic relations that connect an event to another. In this paper, we report an overview of the main ontologies for representing events and of the tools developed in the Semantic Web field to visualize events and narratives. This overview is needed for achieving the first goal of our research, that is the development of an ontology for representing narratives and, on the top of this ontology, a tool to construct and visualize narratives using the digital objects included in DLs.