From Scenes to Places: Enhancing Film Exploration through the RevIS Ontology-based consultation App

The archives of cinematographic production provide detailed, immediate descriptions of places and cultural habits over time through the stories that movies narrate or the realities they represent. However, current movie catalogs fail to integrate the sparse viewpoints presented by films because they support searches based on standard metadata, lacking a rich representation of places' features. To address this limitation, in the project ``Revisualizing Italian Silentscapes 1896-1922'' (RevIS), we extended traditional film ontologies with an explicit representation of narrative and actual places referenced in movies through their scenes. Specifically, we defined the RevIS place ontology, which provides a structured, multifaceted model for representing places in films. Based on this ontology, we developed the RevIS consultation app that supports advanced information exploration and visualization of movie data. The app enables users to explore information about geographical areas and cultural habits through cinematographic production. We evaluated the app with 28 participants, including generic non-scholarly users, movie amateurs, and film experts. They were satisfied with the information search support and valued the presentation of customs and habits in places over time through movie scenes. Specifically, they requested additional visualization features to enhance the connection between movie scenes and the spatial and temporal aspects of places. This finding confirms the added value of adopting place ontologies in current movie catalogs and provides suggestions for future extensions of the RevIS film archive.