An attempt to use ontologies in folklore studies

The paper examines the method of using ontologies in folklore study by describing it on the example of the electronic portal system “Folklore of the peoples of Siberia”. Ontological data organization allows solving the range of problems in the field of folklore studies. The author puts forward scalable classifications of folklore resources by genre (the Genre meta-ontology branch) or the performance context (the Ritual meta-ontology branch). Folklore study proves to be a poorly structured area of knowledge. The concepts of folklore are proposed to be described by means of several domain ontologies. Ontologies allow describing both the exterior and the interior sides of folklore works. The models suggested can be used both to characterize folklore resources and to navigate the system. The CIDOC-CRM standard is adapted for a formal meta-description of a collection of folklore resources. It is used to describe the processes of collecting and preparing folklore works. The ontology of cultural universals, used for marking within texts, is proposed to describe the text elements, their properties and relationships identified in the language corpus by the researcher. Within the framework of the domain ontology, a system of Characters has been developed. The ontological method, suggested here, makes it possible to describe folklore resources from the point of view of their form, as well as to identify the content components of folklore works.