The aim of this project is to compare two Futurist manifestos, focusing on their content, and to formalize the knowledge derived from the comparison in a linked open data environment. The endpoint of this process has been the development of an ontology (MaCo). The ontology was built with the assumption that one term of the comparison will always be the ‘Manifesto del futurismo’ by Marinetti, while the second one can be any other 21 Futurist manifestos written by various authors.
After some research, we decided to use as a comparison the 'Manifesto dei Pittori Futuristi' (1911) to build a knowledge base. For each Manifesto, we chose to analyse only the sections arranged by the author(s) in numbered points, as the quasi-symmetrical structure of this parts was adequate for a comparison. Furthermore, we identified in these lines the textual sites where the meaning was most robustly conveyed.As a starting point, we underlined and manually isolated significant lexical terms and short excerpts for each Manifesto. The brainstorming following this phase resulted in the creation of two mind maps showing terms linking. This process allowed us to gather together under hypernyms the main concepts contained in each text. The two mind maps have not only been used to achieve within-text knowledge, but also as a first tool to identify cross-texts relations.
After studying other ontologies we decided to reuse only few classes and properties (frbr:Expression, skos:Concept, dc:terms) to build MaCo, given that for our comparative scope we found more functional to have more freedom in shaping the model. We made a draft of the ontology with a focus on the entities and the relations that we needed for comparing the concepts in the two manifestos. In doing this, we took inspiration from PhiloSURFical, a tool made to semantically navigate Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus relying on an ontology created to describe the philosophical domain at various levels of abstraction. Special attention was devoted to the lexical research for concepts’ definition. For this purpose we used thesauri published on the Semantic Web - namely the Getty’s Art & Architecture Thesaurus and WordNet.
In the iterative process entailed in the ontology development, we run into a series of complexities. This resulted in defining various different solutions before being able to find the right schema to enable the comparison between two separate texts. MaCo was built using Protégé. When the ontology was ready we extracted the RDF and we used it to render the documentation using LODE and to visualize the Knowledge Graph using the tool offered by Rhizomik.
We finally put everything on a website. It includes an introductory section with information on the Futurist movement and its manifestos, an interactive part where the user is able to explore the topics comparison produced manually and to surf the relations among the concepts resulting from our Knowledge Base and a section specifically devoted to the ontology.