Re: Modeling fictional characters in movies and TV

[Gregg Kellogg]

On Jan 9, 2013, at 8:39 AM, Paul Rissen <paul....@bbc.co.uk> wrote:

> Thanks for passing this on, Dan.
>
> There'd definitely be interest in using the work done with
> Ontomedia/Stories to enhance possible schema.org extensions, I reckon.
>
> I *think* the Comics proposal mentions the work I did on a Comics ontology
> (describing the narrative content therein).
>
> re: the point about video games, I'd agree - as with most media, the
> majority of previous approaches treat it from a bibliographic/publishing
> POV, rather than from a narrative content POV (or, with games, the game
> mechanics).
>
> Keep me posted, happy to help where possible.

Wikia has quite a number of wikis about comics. As you know, modeling this information can be quite difficult, given all of the incompatible and overlapping timelines of the characters (often the same character!).

We'd be interested in helping to bring about schema.org extensions to help model comics. I'm sure it has much in common with the needs of Movies, TV and Video Games.

Our modeling of Video Games makes great use of sub-types of events, such as Level, Mission and Objective. We find that defining these as an ordered collection, along with previous/next links between the various entities, allows for effective navigation between the different objects, but maintaining the next/previous references in concert with list ordinality can be challenging. Then again, not everything can be described using a strict sequence.

RDF Collections are great for being able to describe such ordered events, although querying is more challenging. In our case, we typically work with JSON-LD serializations, which make this much easier than with strict first/rest links. One challenge is that defining an inverse property where the property takes the form of a collection makes it difficult (at least through entailment rules) to fine the object of the inverse property (i.e. if a comic can be described as a collection of panels using a :panel property, what's the appropriate entailment to get :isPanelOf back to the original subject?). This all sounds like a good reason to use something like the EventList from the Stories ontology (or similar) [1], but the fact is that RDF collections are really convenient from Turtle, RDFa and Microdata (where schema:event is treated like a collection, already). I think there's a need to describe property relationships that work well with RDF Collections).

Gregg

> On 08/01/2013 23:54, "Dan Brickley" <dan...@danbri.org> wrote:
>
>> Passing this along, in case you missed it...
>>
>> A few more links maybe of interest are in
>> http://pinboard.in/u:danbri/t:narrative
>>
>> Re fiction, see also
>> http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/SchemaDotOrgProposals for TV/Radio
>> extension and Comics, both of which touch on this but don't really
>> address it.
>>
>> Dan
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: Gregg Kellogg <gr...@greggkellogg.net>
>> Date: 8 January 2013 23:43
>> Subject: Modeling fictional characters in movies and TV
>> To: "public...@w3.org Vocabularies" <public...@w3.org>
>>
>>
>> TL:DR: propose adding schema:Character, schema:Location, and
>> schema:FictionalLocation classes, along with a schema:character
>> property.
>>
>> In the work I'm doing with Wikia, we're using extensions to schema.org
>> to add structure to Wiki content. Wikia hosts hundreds of thousands of
>> wiki's, mostly related to special-interest subjects. Important classes
>> of these include sites about Movies, TV Shows/Series and Video Games.
>>
>> The schema.org vocabulary is pretty useful in doing this but lacks
>> some important properties and types:
>>
>> Character class: a Character is a subclass of Person, which is
>> intended to represent some fictional character. This could include
>> fictional human characters, such as Sam Spade, as well as non-human
>> characters, such as "The Cat in the Hat". As such, it could also be
>> considered to be a union of schema:CreativeWork and schema:Person.
>> Alternatively, it may simply be a sub-class of Creative Work which
>> simply has some properties in common with Person (birthDate,
>> colleague, gender, ...). Note that books can also have characters.
>>
>> Character property: An important characteristic of things such as
>> movies, and TV shows is the characters that are in them. For instance,
>> TVEpisode has actor, director, producer and so forth, but no way to
>> indicate the characters that are in the show. Here is where having
>> Character class comes in handy, so that you might have the following:
>>
>> <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Where_No_Man_Has_Gone_Before_(episode)>
>> a schema:TVEpisode;
>> schema:name "Where No Man Has Gone Before"@en;
>> schema:partOfTVSeries
>> <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series>;
>> schema:character <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/James_T._Kirk>;
>> schema:actor <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/William_Shatner> .
>>
>> <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/James_T._Kirk> a schema:Character
>> schema:name "James T. Kirk";
>> schema:birthDate "2233-03-22"^^xsd:date;
>> schema:deathDate "2371"^^xsd:gYear;
>> schema:actor <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/William_Shatner> .
>>
>> Another class of properties generally useful for works of media
>> classes is Location. A schema:Location class could be a sub-class of
>> schema:Place, intended to describe locations that might not be real,
>> or not at least not having geographic coordinates you can get to using
>> Goole Maps. A location could also be a Fictional Location, such as
>> Middle Earth.
>>
>> Lastly, many wiki's concern themselves with Video Games, which have
>> quite deep structure. Logically, a Video Game is probably a sub-class
>> of schema:SoftwareApplication. Of course, there are many other things
>> that could be modeled on video games, such as levels, objectives and
>> weapons, but having a concrete class for describing them would be
>> quite useful.
>>
>> Gregg Kellogg
>> gr...@greggkellogg.net
>
>
>
> -----------------------------
> http://www.bbc.co.uk
> This e-mail (and any attachments) is confidential and
> may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC unless specifically stated.
> If you have received it in
> error, please delete it from your system.
> Do not use, copy or disclose the
> information in any way nor act in reliance on it and notify the sender
> immediately.
> Please note that the BBC monitors e-mails
> sent or received.
> Further communication will signify your consent to
> this.
> -----------------------------