Italo Calvino's ‘destini incrociati’. An experiment of semantic narrative modelling and visualisation

Il castello dei destini incrociati, thanks to its logical and combinatorial structure, lends itself to experiencing a formal ontology to achieve a semantic visualisation of the narrative created by the author using the tarot cards. Specifically, this research aims to investigate the work’smacchina narrativa combinatoria([1]: 124) using Semantic Web technologies to formalise and analyse the textual aspects that concern the collection's narrative and compositional structures. Data has been interpreted in the light of three main aspects: the semantics conveyed by the tarot cards, the text structure and the relations between cards. The result is ODI (Ontologia dei Destini incrociati di Italo Calvino) and its corresponding Knowledge Base (BACODI, Base di Conoscenza dell’Ontologia dei Destini incrociati di Italo Calvino) that formalise the description of tarot cards as artefacts and as narrative instances in the text. ODI and BACODI represent a new way to reflect on a non-conventional method to publish the edition of a literary work. All the contents can be browsed through MACODI (Macchina Combinatoria dell’Ontologia dei Destini incrociati di Italo Calvino), a web application for a multilayered view of the knowledge stored in BACODI.