Narrative Semantic Web —Case National Finnish Epic Kalevala Eero Hyv¨onen, Tuomas Palonen, and Joeli Takala Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo) Aalto University, School of Science and Technology, and University of Helsinki http://www.seco.tkk.fi/, first.last@tkk.fi Abstract. This paper presents the idea of publishing stories and doc- umented processes on the Semantic Web. By using narrative metadata and content descriptions based on ontologies, different parts, concepts, and individuals appearing in a story can be automatically linked to other parts of the narrative and to external related resources. This makes it possible to enrich the reading, searching, and browsing experience of the user. We present a case study, where the narrative story and content of the Finnish national epic Kalevala has been modeled in RDF/OWL and published as part of the semantic portal CultureSampo. Narratives are an important aspect of culture; they are recounts of stories describing a sequence of fictional events (e.g. in novels, epics, etc.) or real life events (e.g., in history, processes, news, etc.). This paper presents the idea of representing narratives on the semantic web as semantic structures [1] that can be used for enriching end-user reading experience and for supporting folklore research. The object of our case study is the Finnish national epic Kalevala 1 that has been a constant source of inspiration to Finnish authors, designers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, and that is related to large collections of cultural her- itage and research. The epic contains 50 runes (each about 1500 words) in 22,795 lines, was published in two major editions by Elias L¨ onnrot in 1835 and 1849, and has been translated to some 60 human languages. Now the epic is available also to computers as a translation to RDF/OWL, and has been published on the semantic web 2 . The annotation model has three levels. The poem texts are divided into major episodes of the story that are linked with each other to represent story chains. Each episode may be divided into scenes that may have further sub-scenes. They represent meaningful fragments of episode texts to the reader. Finally, each scene consists of atomic events whose semantic content is represented in terms of keyword resources (e.g., riding, horse, Kullervo) taken from a set of domain ontologies. The annotations were created by a folklorist with the SAHA editor using ONKI Ontology Servers 3 . 1 http://www.finlit.fi/kalevala/index.php?m=163&l=2 2 http://www.seco.tkk.fi/applications/kulttuurisampo/kalevala/ 3 http://www.seco.tkk.fi/services/saha/