The Porn0graph: a Semantic Web Storytelling Engine in Perl

The Porn0graph: a Semantic Web Storytelling Engine in Perl

By Jo Walsh
Date: Friday, 25 July 2003 12:10
Duration: 20 minutes
Language:

The porn0graph is a collaborative storytelling engine that many people can
play with, built out of RDF, XML and perl.

Users create multiple-choice stories, which can be influenced by objects
in the world, taking place in locations in it. There is a web interface
for story-building. screenshot: http://porn0graph.frot.org/screenshot.png

Underlying the porn0graph is an RDF model, recalling the actions of
players and presenting potential storylines, allowing people to create and
connect new ones, create new objects and locations. The RDF model has a
RESTful query interface done with mod_perl - you can follow stories by
GETting them, write by POSTing new scenes and objects. Collaborative
story-writing, also dynamic story-reading; an OWL ontology for narratives,
loosely categorising scenes and the events in them, describes the
alteration of story options, if preferences are described or inferred.

There is a Jabber instant message bot front-end. The bot presents the
story world like an infocom-style text adventure game; the reader has
multiple choices as they walk through the world, and can acquire objects
which affect the future narrative. There is a to-be-explored interactive
aspect between readers/players in the game/story, talking and maintaining
presence via jabber.

The author's code for the jabber interface is on CPAN (and the RDF model
query language should be). The prototype is at http://porn0graph.frot.org/
... the prototype storytelling engine was built to tell fairly light,
woman oriented text porn stories, designed with emily, editor for
http://www.cliterati.co.uk/