From a philological / Literature / Poetry point of view, POSTDATA ontology enables the standardization of European Poetry using standard terminology for its concepts across different literary traditions, periods, poetic genres and authors. This will enable in the future the comparison of the characteristics and data in this poetry, and thus to carry out invaluable research in Comparative Literature and Comparative Metrical Studies in a quantitative fashion.
The POSTDATA ontology standard terminology has been elaborated by analyzing and comparing the terminology and classes used in twenty-five poetry repositories of European poetic traditions. The challenge of creating a POSTDATA ontology has been that of defining a unified terminology for the different literary tradition.
The center of the POSTDATA ontology is the postdata core which focuses on general and bibliographical characteristics of a poetic work. Other ontologies, related to postdata core, address other features of the poetic work, like prosodic, rhetorical devices, dating or textual transmission aspects.
POSTDATA CORE ontology has three fundamental concepts: PoeticWork, Redaction and Ensemble
Since it is the core or central ontology of the network, classes that are not typical of one of the domains related to poetry but that represent a transversal knowledge have also been incorporated. These classes complete the relevant information not only for the classes of the core ontology but also for other ontologies of a more specific domain.
The following entities have therefore been identified:
- Person and Organisation, to model the agents that intervene in the poetic work with different roles.
- CreatorRole and Role that model the authorship or creation of the works and elements of manifestation and transmission and other roles as editor, for example.
- Place and Event, to represent places of origin and mentioned events.
The core ontology, would be imported by the rest of ontologies of the network, for this reason besides containing the mentioned classes, it also provides a set of common properties that have the same semantics in all the classes in which they are defined. In this way it is possible to express semantics in an unambiguous way for properties that from this point of view represent conceptually the same thing.
The core-ontology specification is available at postdata.linhd.uned.es/ontology/postdata-core/
