[Freebase-discuss] The Many Lives of Fictional Characters

[Paul Houle]

    The representation of Fiction is a topic that's dear to my heart.

    It's clear that we need some ability to separate out fictional words 
from the real world,  yet that separation shouldn't be 100%.  For 
instance,  people often use analogies with fictional characters and 
events to describe things in the real world.  This is true both in 
general ("Hamlet",  "Darth Vader",  and "The Terminator" are references 
that you can trust people to understand) and in specific communities 
(we've been watching "Get Smart" and "Macross F" in our house and both 
of those provide references that are used analogically in conversations 
all the time.)

    The Microtheory concept used in Cyc and described in Guha's thesis,  
see http://www-formal.stanford.edu/guha/ is the most advanced approach 
to these issues that I've seen.  I'm currently thinking a lot about how 
to extend Named Graphs in RDF to support microtheories and other useful 
mechanisms,  see

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2010Jan/0052.html

    Something interesting about fiction [and real life] is the multiple 
versions of stories.  There's a Japanese word "densetsu" which means 
"legendary";  one of the characteristics of a "legend" in the Japanese 
sense is a story that has an archetypical element that's told in 
different ways.  There are two Japanese religious texts,  the "Nihonji" 
and the "Kojiiki" that are quite a lot like the old testament of the 
Bible:  both are full of lists of who begat whom,  what Emperor ruled 
from what year to what year, etc.  The two books basically tell the same 
story,  but the details are different:  for instance,  the exact reigns 
of the emperors.

    In fairy tales there's a fairly extreme version of this:  many 
versions of "Jack and the Beanstalk" are circulating. There's certainly 
an archetypical core,  but there's a range of variation about that.

    And of course,  continuity reboots are part and parcel of modern 
visual fiction:  for instance,  the recent "Star Trek" movie paints a 
somewhat different version of the young James Kirk than one would get 
from the earlier "Star Trek".  The live action version of "Sailor Moon" 
tells essentially the same story as the first season of the anime,  but 
just a bit different.

     You should also take a look at the excellent

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage

and

http://skipforward.opendfki.de/wiki/DBTropes

    these are based around the idea that characters and situations are 
decomposable into common memes,  or "tropes."  This is probably the best 
ontology of fiction I've seen so far.