Storyline Ontology

This ontology has been created in collaboration with

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.

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 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.