Frame-Based Models of Communities and Their History

Abstract

Previous models of communities and their history have focused on the entities in those communities such as their locations and people. We introduce models which incorporate behaviors and processes. We propose that approaches based on object-oriented modeling are particularly useful. Specifically, we explore the feasibility of developing object-oriented models which employ linguistic frames adapted from the FrameNet corpus. We apply these models to relatively straightforward and self-contained historical scenarios. We implement the models in Java and analyze some of advantages and challenges in that approach. Historical newspapers are particularly rich sources of natural language descriptions about communities but there are many sources of non-linguistic information about communities which may also be incorporated. We consider the possibilities of developing more coherent models of communities based on modeling processes, partonomies, systems, and situations. Finally, we consider enabling greater interactivity with the structured models and alternative architectures for the models.