This site presents an ontology for describing aspects of curatorial narratives and their underlying conceptual structure. The ontology draws on structuralist theories that distinguish between story (i.e. what can be told), plot (i.e. an interpretation of the story) and narrative (i.e. its presentational form).

A story is represented as containing events that can be described according to different facets such as time, location an theme. A plot is represented as the specification of a network of significant relationships between the events of the story, therefore imposing a particular interpretation on the story. A narrative (discourse) is represented as the structure of the presentation that could be, for example, a physical or hypermedia space.

The curate ontology distinguishes between two types of narrative: heritage object narratives and curatorial narratives. A heritage object narrative tells a story about a heritage object. These may be, for example, the presentation and description of the heritage object in an exhibition catalogue, or the text label or audio guide description associated with the heritage object in the museum space. A curatorial narrative threads across a number of heritage object narratives to create a narrative such as a museum exhibition. A curatorial narrative therefore makes relationships across a set of exhibits, yielding more complex insights than could be made from the exhibits individually

The URI for this vocabulary is

Each class or property in the vocabulary has a URI constructed by appending the term name to the vocabulary URI. For example:

When used in XML documents the suggested prefix is curate

Properties in the vocabulary that refer to the concept event as their domain or range (e.g. curate:describesEvent has the concept event as its range) use both crm:Event and lode:Event for compatibility with events represented using CIDOC CRM and LODE. The representation of plot structure and narrative organisation makes extensive use of the description-situation pattern used in Event-Model-F to represent causal and correlational relationships between events.

The curate ontology has been developed as part of the DECIPHER project, funded by the EU 7th Framework Programme in the area of Digital Libraries and Digital Preservation.

The curate ontology is being used in conjunction with storyspace to model curatorial narratives on the (conceptual) story level.

Contact: Paul Mulholland

Publication date: 13th September 2011

Last update: 6th December 2011

Further information

Mulholland, P., Wolff, A., Collins, T., Zdrahal, Z.: An event-based approach to describing and understanding museum narratives. In: Detection, Representation, and Exploitation of Events in the Semantic Web. Workshop in conjunction with the International Semantic Web Conference (2011).
This paper introduces the curate ontology and discusses how it has been motivated by work on the nature of narrative and an analysis of museum exhibitions and their conceptualisation.

References

Troncy, R., Malocha, B., Fialho, A.: Linking events with media. In: I-Semantics (2010).

Scherp, A., Franz, T., Saathoff, C., Staab, S. F—A Model of Events based on the Foundational Ontology DOLCE+DnS Ultralite. In: K-CAP (2009).

Crofts, N., Doerr, M., Gill, T., Stead, S., Stiff, M. (eds.): Definition of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, (2010).

Shaw, R., Troncy, R., Hardman, L.: LODE: Linking Open Descriptions of Events. In: Asian Semantic Web Conference (2009).