Ontological Search
A great deal of early folklore classification has been concerned with developing ontologies for the study of folklore. The ATU index, the Migratory Legend index, and the Motif Index of Folk Literature all stand as examples of folklore ontologies, even though they are not particularly "deep." Ontological search engines can be powerful and quite fast. Once an ontology is developed for the existing training set of 1000 stories, we hope to propagate the ontology across the entire existing corpus automatically.
Working with Karthik Ramani from Purdue, we intend to explore the development of an ontological search engine for the rapid and accurate retrieval of documents, even when the query terms are less than precise. A specific challenge is to develop a domain ontology for the Evald Tang Kristensen collection. Such an ontology should be generalizable to Nordic folklore, and will take advantage of significant work already done by Terry Gunnell in his Sagnagrunnur project.