Greek Mythology as a Knowledge Graph: From Chaos to Zeus and Beyond

Greek mythology has been exerting a lasting influence on Western culture, but a respective ontology has been missing from the Semantic Web until now. To remedy this deficiency, from 5377 Wikidata items with 283 properties, 34 of these properties were selected to generate a first version of an Ontology of Greek Mythology (OGM). This limited set of properties was used to define a set of classes to instantiate the descriptions of the individuals according to reification requirements. The ontology also includes the representation of contradictions between statements, a well-known symptom of classical storytelling. A retrieval tool was added to use the Wikidata Query Service through SPARQL queries in order to display and download results in various formats, thereby developing OGM into a scholarly tool. Further, as Wikidata has little information about classical sources grounding the truth of its statements, we tested a semantic enrichment workflow to extract additional statement types from source texts in the ‘Theoi Project’ as statement anchors. This workflow experiment proved necessary to go beyond Wikipedia to address mythological complexities in a knowledge graph, but, as discussed in the article, its scalable automation requires further development.