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Storyline Ontology

An ontology to represent News Storylines.

Authors , /blogs/internet/authors/Jeremy_Tarling,
Contributors Paul Rissen, Helen Lippell, Matt Chadburn, Tom Leitch, Dan Brickley, Michael Smethurst, Sebastien Cevey
Created Date 2013-05-01
Version 0.3
Licence
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This ontology has been created in collaboration with The Guardian, Press Association, and OntoBa.

Introduction

The News Storyline Ontology is a generic model for describing and organising the stories news organisations tell. The ontology is intended to be flexible to support any given news or media publisher's approach to handling news stories. At the heart of the ontology, is the concept of Storyline. As a nuance of the English language the word 'story' has multiple meanings. In news organisations, a story can be an individual piece of content, such as an article or news report. It can also be the editorial view on events occurring in the world.

The journalist pulls together information, facts, opinion, quotes, and data to explain the significance of world events and their context to create a narrative. The event is an award being received; the story is the triumph over adversity and personal tragedy of the victor leading up to receiving the reward (and the inevitable fall from grace due to drugs and sexual peccadillos). Or, the event is a bombing outside a building; the story is an escalating civil war or a gas mains fault due to cost cutting. To avoid this confusion, the term Storyline has been used to remove the ambiguity between the piece of creative work (the written article) and the editorial perspective on events.

News Storyline model

A Storyline in its most basic form can be an individual, but typically would consist of a richer collection of storyline components. These components exist in slots that can be fully ordered using an index property, ordered temporally, or arranged in a graph to possibly express parallel running developments. 

Storyline slots diagram

Storyline components can be indisputable real world events, or other storylines (chapters, sub-plots, updates, news developments etc). Storylines can be associated with Topics in some knowledge domain (eg people, places, organisations).

As news stories are typically of a subjective nature (one news publisher's interpretation of any given news story may be different from another's), Storylines can be attributed to some agent to provide this provenance.

The implementation of the Attribution, Topic, and Event classes has been purposely left open so the storyline ontology can be flexibly integrated into existing wider publishing domain models without assumption.

Ontology Terms

Automatically generated documentation for the ontology terms.

Classes

Attribution
URI
Description Attribution of a storyline used for attributing the interpretation of the storyline to some agent. An interface class, that doesn't restrict the implementation of an attribution.
Properties attributedTo
Event
URI
Description A newsworthy event. An un-disputable real world event.
Superclasses StorylineComponent
Storyline
URI
Description A news storyline.
Superclasses StorylineComponent
Properties attributedTo, hasChapter, hasDevelopment, hasSlot, hasUpdate, synopsis, topic
StorylineComponent
URI
Description An abstract parent class of storyline components.
Subclasses Event, Storyline
Properties contains, dateCreated
StorylineSlot
URI
Description A storyline slot, used as a container for storyline components.
Properties contains, follows, hasChapter, hasDevelopment, hasSlot, hasUpdate, index, time
Topic
URI
Description The topic of a storyline. An interface to some concept in a knowledge domain.
Properties topic

Properties

attributedTo
URI
Description Associates a storyline to its attribution. Provides for interpretation provenance through attribution
Domain Storyline
Range Attribution
contains
URI s
Description Associates a Slot to a StorylineComponent contained therein. Can be a news event or another storyline
Domain StorylineSlot
Range StorylineComponent
dateCreated
URI
Description The date a storyline was created
Domain StorylineComponent
Range
follows
URI
Description Allows one or more slots to be sequenced. Slot A follows Slot B.
Domain StorylineSlot
Range StorylineSlot
hasChapter
URI
Description Associates a slot to a storyline as a chapter of an existing storyline.
Superproperties hasSlot
Domain Storyline
Range StorylineSlot
hasDevelopment
URI
Description Associates a slot to a storyline as a development of an existing storyline.
Superproperties hasSlot
Domain Storyline
Range StorylineSlot
hasSlot
URI
Description Associates a slot to a storyline. A storyline can have many slots
Subproperty hasChapter, hasDevelopment, hasUpdate
Domain Storyline
Range StorylineSlot
hasUpdate
URI
Description Associates a slot to a storyline as an update to an existing storyline.
Superproperties hasSlot
Domain Storyline
Range StorylineSlot
index
URI
Description A slot index. Allows slots to be ordered numerically
Domain StorylineSlot
Range
synopsis
URI
Description The synopsis of a storyline
Domain Storyline
Range
time
URI
Description The time of a slot. A Temporal entity, an interval. Allows slots to be ordered temporally.
Domain StorylineSlot
Range
topic
URI
Description Associates a slot to a topic
Domain Storyline
Range Topic

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