MOVING D3.3 - Tools for science-society-policy interfaces. Using semantic story maps to describe a territory beyond its map

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

Story maps  Semantic Web  Ontology  Web applications  Narratives  e-Infrastructures  Virtual Research Environments 

Maps have always stimulated people's imagination and spatiotemporally supported storytelling; however, they cannot alone represent the life and emotions associated with the territories they describe. Story maps are an IT solution to enrich maps with such information. They are online applications enriched with multimedia and textual information that tell map-based stories. Current software for story map building is either commercial or requires advanced IT skills that make it hardly used by environmental experts. This deliverable describes the Story Map Building and Visualizing Tool (SBVMT), an open-source and free-to-use tool to build and publish story maps, which overcomes common drawbacks of other software by operating within the open-science e-Infrastructure (D4Science) used in the MOVING Project. SBVMT includes new features such as an ontology to represent story maps, Semantic Web technologies for data representation, automatic connection to Wikidata, secure multi-user collaboration in story building, and visualisation of the narrative either as a story map or a timeline. This deliverable shows how SBVMT can overcome the perceptual gap between territory and map. We evaluated its usability and effectiveness from both the point of view of experts building the story map and users interacting with it. Using SMBVT we created the story maps related to the MOVING selected regions. Furthermore, exploiting the semantic web technologies, we implemented several SPARQL queries that allow linking different stories and discovering new knowledge.

Source: ISTI Research Report, MOVING, D3.3, 2022