Towards a novel ontology-driven interface for cinematographic places

Archives and commercial platforms usually present films as bibliographic resources, with basic attributes such as director, actors, year of production, and language. The film’s story is often limitedly represented through a synopsis or a short summary of the plot. Our project focuses on a relevant though neglected element of the story: the film places, intended as the narrative places, i.e. the places where the events of the narrative occur, and the displayed locations, i.e. the places that represent the narrative places in the film. The real-world counterparts of film places, once represented in film archives and commercial platforms, could have an impact on practical activities, such as location management, film tourism, the history of urbanism, and cultural archives. This paper presents a demo of a system for displaying places and their relationships within a larger cultural context. The system is currently in use in the RevIS (Revisualising Italian Silentscapes, 1896-1922) project, for the exploration of the relationships between the cinematic productions of Italian silent cinema of the early twentieth century and the places, to address their dynamic transformation during that period. Digital maps display a parallel view of film narrative places and displayed locations, while users can browse the film sequences and access the individual scenes. The dual-map metaphor allows for fleshing out the connection between the plot sequences and the places and relies upon an ontology-based metadata model we have devised for the digital archive of films and places. We also report on a preliminary evaluation of the demo interface, with promising results and expected criticisms.