What We Are Doing:
Using ontological engineering, Culture Shock seeks to provide comprehensive answers to questions about a particular subset of television shows (i.e. Atlanta) and the political themes covered within them. The questions we seek to provide answers include items such as: Does Lee experience Police Brutality? and Is Alfred Miles trolled by Zan? In an effort to achieve our goal, Culture Shock uses holistic methods to ensure that perspectives from culture, legislation, and social media are represented in the answer returned. Our hope is that by structuring such expansive datasets our user has a better understanding of the vast cultural, legal, and social landscapes that shape the show because knowledge is power.
What The Experience Feels Like:
The user can trigger the Culture Shock in the standard fashion as any chrome extension. The extension will open as a small window that is part of the current tab. The user is then prompted to enter a structured question into that window, that should be based relating to the thematic, cultural, and legal aspect of the show. Questions are structured as a drop down menu in the following format: [Five Ws and Is] + [Character] + [Theme]. The extension will then use its ontology to search for a response to the question as it relates to culture, legislation and social media.
The ontology will be used to support inference of the additional information drawn from the show and theme provided to develop a better curated search to use with legislation and social media searches.
To view a few examples of how to utilize the ontology, please go here.
Broader Impacts
Culture Shock could be extended to anything in relation to TV shows. While the original project is intended to help answer questions regarding themes, the portion where we model information about characters and the show can be extended to cover other shows. Potentially this extension could allow the ontology to model entire collections of shows. This could allow Culture Shock to become a database of tv shows available in an easily queriable format. Furthermore, if the themes continue to be extended, questions regarding themes in the context of multiple shows or other shows other than Atlanta could be asked as well.
Who Are The Developers:
Helping Out
Contributions to Culture Shock are always welcomed by other individuals. For more details regarding extending our project, please check out our Getting Involved page here.
This work is part of the Ontology Engineering course at RPI and is supervised by Professors Deborah McGuinness and Elisa Kendall.