Theoretical Model
Who, When, Where and What are our main keystones for the theoretical specification of our entities.
Who
The people involved in the event which is the central theme of our project are actually almost half a million, as many as the participants in the festival. However, in describing the founding structures of our model, we have mainly taken into consideration those people without whom the event would never have happened: the organizers, the technicians and the performer artists themselves. All of them is defined by his or her career, production and relationships, these are the reasons why in order to describe them deeply as possible we have decided to employ a mix of several different ontologies and vocabulary like FOAF, Person Core Vocabulary, Core Concept Ontology, Music Ontology, and dbpedia.
When
The span of time in which the festival took place has been recently included in those reasons that can let us define the 1969 as the "year that everything changed". We therefore decided to consider separately, as time spans (and not simply dates) the year itself, as melting pot of social and cultural changements in the American and global history; and the three-day span of the festival, as the concrete lasting of the event we took in consideration. In order to do so we mainly employed the OWL Time Ontology for aspects strictly related to time itself, together with CIDOC CRM to connect the time span to a broader period. All the dates are encoded using the International Standard ISO 8601 both in the format Complete Date YYYY-MM-DD and Year YYYY.
Where
The event passed down in history as the "Festival of Woodstock", but it actually took place in a small and quite unknown town nearby, that for three days was completely overloaded by thousands of young people. In modelling the places related to our event, we then decided to distinguish the two towns involved as well as the actual site in which the festival took place. Although both related to the concept of "place", the two typologies of entities present some meaningful differences, such as the necessity to give a complete description of all the features of a city or the possibility for the site to have an adress or a owner. While unifing them under the same elements able to describe the geographical aspect of our event, we also decided to pay particular attention in underling the peculiarities of each of them. In formally describing the "where" we hence decided to employ Geonames, the ontology for geographical information, however in combination with more specific purpouse ontologies such as Geo Basic, CIDOCCRM, dbpedia and schema.org.
What
Woodstock was not only just a music festival, it became a landmark of alternative ideas and concepts. Both audience and music manifestation had underlined the strong influence they had from the political background. Through the multiple concepts that are coming parallel with Woodstock we have distinguished two main keystones that are strictly related with our event and gave its main social manifestation. Several ontologies were being chosen in order to give in the most catalytic way the essence of the two concepts. CIDOC-CRM,RDF(S),DCMI Metadata Terms ,PROV-O, DBpedia Ontology, FOAF,The Music Ontology, were all combined giving in the most adequate way the description of our relationships
