Story Map Building and Visualising Tool (SMBVT)

Lenzi E, Bartalesi V, Pratelli N, Coro G, Pagano P

Story maps  Semantic Web  Ontology 

In the context of the MOVING (MOuntain Valorisation through INterconnectedness and Green growth) project, we released an open-source software - the MOVING Story Map Building and Visualization Tool (SMBVT) - that allows users to create and visualise story maps within a collaborative environment and using a user-friendly Web interface. The tool uses Semantic Web technologies and the Narrative Ontology to represent the stories of the MOVING mountain Value Chains. The MOVING community access SMBVT through The MOVING story map Virtual Research Environment and creates the events of the story. For each event, the user can add: a title, a textual description, start and end dates, the geographic coordinates, a media object (i.e. a video or image), notes, and digital objects. The tool takes Wikidata as reference KB and assigns Wikidata Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) to the story components (i.e. the entities that take part in an event). All the knowledge collected by SMBVT is stored in a JSON Postgres DB. When a story is completed, the tool automatically creates the corresponding visualisation using StoryMapJS library and makes available a corresponding URL that can be freely shared. Finally, SMBVT saves the collected knowledge as a Web Ontology Language (OWL) graph and publishes it as a Linked Open Data.