Abstract
Information about the various resources, concepts, and entities in the world of comics can be found in a wide range of systems, including those of libraries, archives, and museums, as well as the records of independent research projects. Semantic Web technologies and standards represent an opportunity to connect these resources using Linked Data. In an attempt to realize this opportunity, this thesis presents a case study for the development of a domain ontology for comic books and comic book collections. In the initial phase, reference resources and example materials were collected and consulted to develop a representative domain model and core schema. A workflow was then developed to convert common CSV data to XML and RDF/XML, replacing common values with LOD URIs using XSLT. The second phase of the study then focused on publishing Linked Data using HTML/RDFa. A review of existing information systems and an analysis of their content was conducted in order to address the usability of the vocabulary, and inform the design of a series of modularized metadata application profiles using the core schema as a base. Examples were tested for their ability to produce valid, meaningful RDF data from HTML content that was consistent with the ontology. The final result is an RDFS/OWL Web vocabulary for comics, titled the Comic Book Ontology (CBO). It is an open and extensible semantic model that identifies comics using two components: (a) the form and (b) the container. This approach allows the Ontology’s conceptualization of comics to include comic books, comic strips, web comics, graphic novels, manga, or original artwork, with the potential for further describing other aspects of comics culture and scholarship, or connecting, community created data to Semantic Web applications, such as next-generation library catalogs.