Modeling and Reasoning over Observations: An Ontology for Literary Criticism

In the scope of the Digital Humanities, it is useful to represent and reason about data that make explicit claims (observations) on the subjects being studied. This is particularly interesting in literary criticism, where scholars debate about different topics, sometimes grounding their claims on what others have said, some other times rejecting and even contradicting others. In this paper we present an ontology, in the form of a Semantic Web model, to support the documentation, analysis, and management of observational data. Our ontology focuses on literary criticism, but its development implies a modular architecture, enabling its use in other application contexts. We discuss throughout the paper the motivations for our research, as well as its potential and limitations.