Storyscope: using theme and setting to guide story enrichment from external data sources

Museum narratives, like other forms of narrative, are developed from an underlying conceptualization of events that can be referred to as the story. Storyscope is a web-based environment for constructing and exploring museum narratives and their underlying concepts. Storyscope aligns with a formal model of story and narrative specialized for a museum context called the curate ontology. This paper will explore the plot-reasoning component of Storyscope that provides intelligent support for the selection of events within the story and their interconnection as a coherent structure to be told within the narrative. Plot reasoning uses both internal knowledge and external information sources, such as Freebase and Factforge, to propose events that can be used to incrementally develop storylines and to emplot a museum narrative. The approach taken uses the notions of setting and theme to search and rank events in terms of their relevance to the developing storyline. This paces the expansion of the story in each step, ensures that the story develops in a direction that is of interest to the author and helps to maintain narrative cohesion, an important goal of story-building. Plot development is also supported by methods for clustering events into related plot elements and by using information from Freebase to propose different types of influence relations between story events.