Navigating story ontospace : Perspective-relative drive and combinatory montage of cinematic content

The dilemma of designing interactive narrative media is how to empower the participants to tell the author’s story from their own point of view, yet in a structured manner. We propose a solution by means of associating story elements with metadata that constitute a story ontospace. It is defined by multiple narrative dimensions each of which follow one meaningful aspect of the story. The spectator can choose a perspective, which is essentially a prioritization among the narrative dimensions. This is formalized as a projection of the story space onto a uniquely apparent landscape, to which each dimension contributes to the chosen degree. The straightest trajectory through this landscape corresponds to a perspective-relative narrative path that always follows a coherent sequence. This model and its algorithmic implementation will be demonstrated with a database- adaptation of a typical cinema plot. Re-narrated examples generated by the model can be intuitively evaluated by the reader