‘Classical’ ontologies are largely sufficient to provide a static , a priori definition of the concepts and of their properties. This is no more true when we consider the dynamic behavior of the concepts, i.e., we want to describe their mutual relationships when they take part in some concrete action, situation etc. (‘events’). NKRL deals with this problem by adding to the usual ontology of concept an ‘ontology of events’, a new sort of hierarchical organization where the nodes, called ‘templates’, represent general classes of events like “move a physical object”, “be present in a place”, “produce a service”, “send/receive a message”, etc.
Published in Chapter:
Representation Languages for Unstructured ‘Narrative’ Documents
Gian Piero Zarri (University Paris Est and LISSI Laboratory, France)
Copyright: © 2011
|Pages: 14
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-931-1.ch132
Abstract
A big amount of important, ‘economically relevant’ information, is buried into unstructured, multimedia ‘narrative’ resources. This is true, e.g., for most of the corporate knowledge documents (memos, policy statements, reports, minutes etc.), for the news stories, the normative and legal texts, the medical records, many intelligence messages, the ‘storyboards/historians’ describing sequences of events in industrial plants, the surveillance videos, the actuality photos for newspapers and magazines, lot of material (text, image, video, sound…) for eLearning etc., as well as, in general, for a huge fraction of the information stored on the Web. In these ‘narrative documents’, or ‘narratives’, the main part of the information content consists in the description of ‘events’ that relate the real or intended behavior of some ‘actors’ (characters, personages, etc.) – the term ‘event’ is taken here in its more general meaning, covering also strictly related notions like fact, action, state, situation etc. These actors try to attain a specific result, experience particular situations, manipulate some (concrete or abstract) materials, send or receive messages, buy, sell, deliver etc. Note that, in these narratives, the actors or personages are not necessarily human beings; we can have narrative documents concerning, e.g., the vicissitudes in the journey of a nuclear submarine (the ‘actor’, ‘subject’ or ‘personage’) or the various avatars in the life of a commercial product. Note also that, even if a large amount of narrative documents concerns natural language (NL) texts, this is not necessarily true, and ‘narratives’ are really ‘multimedia’. A photo representing a situation that, verbalized, could be expressed as “The US President is addressing the Congress” is not of course an NL text, yet it is still a narrative document. Because of the ubiquity of these ‘narrative’ resources, being able to represent in a general, accurate, and effective way their semantic content – i.e., their key ‘meaning’ – is then both conceptually relevant and economically important: narratives form, in fact, a huge underutilized component of organizational knowledge, and people could be willing to pay for a system able to process in an ‘intelligent’ way this information and/or for the results of the processing. This type of explicit yet unstructured knowledge can be, of course, indexed and searched in a variety of ways, but is requires, however, an approach for formal analysis and effective utilization that is neatly different from the ‘traditional’ ones.