The Art of Narrative and the Semantic Web

The art of the narrative is one of the strongest threads running through our society and culture, and is in many respects one of the defining traits of humanity. "The story" is more than just a recitation of facts or assertions (whether real or otherwise). A good story is experiential. It puts each of us as listeners into the narrator's world and frame of mind, let's us live, vicariously, through the experiences that the narrator had or conceived. In many cases we identify with the protagonist, whether the story is an epic fantasy journey through lost worlds, a sports article talking about the clash between two rival football teams, or the reportage of a major political event. We read meaning into these narratives at many level, from the bald statement of fact to the subtle interplay of analysis, implication, innuendo and metaphor, and it is the richness of these metaphors that give meaning to the work.

Librarians, historians and archivists have spent centuries engaged in an increasingly challenging task. A story, once written, forms a strand of a larger cultural narrative ... but only if that story is placed into an overall context and is preserved within that context. The job of a librarian or archivist is traditionally to ascribe such a story to a classification system -- which in turn makes it locatable within an archive, as well as to abstract from that story enough metadata to decribe what the story is about. Anyone who has spent days poring through newspaper collections trying to pull together enough information to write a report or make a recommendation can tell you the importance of a good classification system (and good abstractions), or better yet, of multiple classification systems that make it easier to triangulate on that information from multiple directions at once.