Character Ontology Paper: "Fans Reconstruct Heroes"

This repository accompanies the manuscript "Fans Reconstruct Heroes: Modeling Fictional Characters in Participatory Culture", submitted to the Semantic Web Journal Special Issue on Semantic Web and Ontology Design for Cultural Heritage.

📜 Overview

The paper introduces the Character Module with evaluation using Competency Quesitons and Case Study of the GOLEM Ontology (Graphs and Ontologies for Literary Evolution Models), a framework for modeling fictional characters across canonical and fan-created works. The ontology:

• Bridges literary theory with participatory culture
• Provides formal representation of dynamic, multi-contextual characters
• Ensures interoperability with CIDOC-CRM, DOLCE, and other standards

🧩 GOLEM Ontology Features

Feature	Description
Mixed Approach	Top-down (theory) + bottom-up (fan data) integration
Modular Design	Reusable components for characters, events, relationships, etc.
Interoperability	Aligns with CIDOC-CRM, DOLCE-Lite-Plus, and LRMoo
Implementation	Developed in Protégé, documented with PyLode

🔍 Case Study: Greek Mythology Fanfiction

Dataset: 10 curated stories from AO3's Ancient Greek Religion and Lore fandom (tagged "Major Character Death")

Methodology

1. Annotation:
   • Manual tagging of death events (victim, perpetrator, method)
   • LLM-assisted feature extraction (Deepseek-V3) with human correction
2. Modeling:
   • RDF conversion using GOLEM ontology
   • SPARQL querying for evaluation

🔗 Ontology Resources:

• GOLEM Main Repository
• SPARQL Endpoint
• Case Study Knowledge Graph

📂 Repository Structure

Character_Ontology_Paper/
├── CaseStudy_ttl/            # RDF datasets for case study
├── CQ-SPARQL                 # Competency questions & queries
└── README.md                 # This file

🏗️ How to Use

1. Explore the CaseStudy_ttl
2. Run SPARQL queries from CQ-SPARQL at our endpoint
3. Refer to the GOLEM documentation for ontology details

📄 Citation

@article{yang2025golem,
  title={Fans Reconstruct Heroes: Modeling Fictional Characters in Participatory Culture},
  author={Yang, Xiaoyan and Pianzola, Federico},
  journal={Semantic Web Journal},
  year={2025},
  note={Under review}
}