What we do now echoes in eternity.

A study of Marcus Aurelius's sentiments and concepts

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The Project

OntoMeditations is a Knowledge Representation and Knowledge Extraction (KRKE) course project, made as part of the Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge (DHDK) program of the Università di Bologna.


Engaged with Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, a major work of Stoic philosophy, our project uses linguistic and sentiment analysis digital techniques applied to a dedicated ontology. The aim is to read and understand this rich philosophical work, as well as its iconic author-emperor-thinker-feeler, in novel ways, through digital lights.


22 Classes

12 Object Properties

6 Data Properties

67 Named Individuals

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The Ontology
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Linguistic Analysis
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Sentiment Analysis

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Competency Questions

Competency Questions

We have created 14 Competency Questions which will help us explore our research domain. In creating them, we considered the main reoccuring themes and concepts in Marcus Aurelius's work. We have provided the formalized queries for each competency question below, and a sample of the results returned by our knowledge graph. The implemented code and data can be found in our Github directory, for users to actually construct the graph and view the query results.

  • In terms of stoic calm percentage associated for each concept, what are the top 5 fragments throughout Meditations and their locations?

    prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
    prefix core: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/>
    SELECT ?fragment ?Chapter ?sentiment
    WHERE {?fragment rdf:type ?o;
    core:positive_sentiment ?sentiment.
    ?Chapter core:hasPart ?fragment.
    }
    ORDER BY desc(?sentiment)
    Limit 5


     Sample results

  • prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
    prefix core: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/>
    prefix category: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/Category/>
    prefix abstractFigure: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/AbstractFigure/>
    SELECT (count(?fragment) as ?count)
    WHERE {
    ?fragment rdf:type ?o;
    core:hasAssociatedConcept ?conceptWord;
    core:hasAssociatedFigure abstractFigure:God.
    ?conceptWord core:isCategoryOf category:nature.
    ?bookchapter core:hasPart ?fragment
    }


    Sample results

  • prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
    prefix core: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/>
    prefix category: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/Category/>
    prefix abstractFigure: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/AbstractFigure/>
    SELECT (count(?fragment) as ?count) (sum (?sentimentPValue)/?count as ?sentimentSum_positve) (sum (?sentimentNValue)/?count as ?sentimentSum_negative)
    WHERE {
    ?fragment rdf:type core:fragments;
    core:positive_sentiment ?sentimentPValue;
    core:negative_sentiment ?sentimentNValue.
    }


    Sample results

  • prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
    prefix core: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/>
    prefix category: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/Category/>
    prefix abstractFigure: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/AbstractFigure/>
    SELECT (count(?fragment1) as ?justiceFragments) (count(?conceptWord) as ?justicewordCount)
    WHERE {
    ?fragment1 rdf:type core:fragments;
    core:hasAssociatedConcept ?conceptWord.
    ?conceptWord core:isCategoryOf category:justice.
    }
    ORDER BY desc(?conceptword)


    Sample results

  • prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
    prefix core: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/>
    prefix category: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/Category/>
    prefix abstractFigure: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/AbstractFigure/>
    SELECT (count(?fragment1) as ?figureGod)
    WHERE {
    ?fragment1 rdf:type core:fragments;
    core:hasAssociatedFigure abstractFigure:God.
    }
    ORDER BY desc(?figureClass)


    Sample results

  • prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
    prefix core: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/>
    prefix category: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/Category/>
    prefix abstractFigure: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/AbstractFigure/>
    SELECT (count(?fragment1) as ?figureNature)
    WHERE {
    ?fragment1 rdf:type core:fragments;
    core:hasAssociatedConcept ?conceptWord1;
    core:hasAssociatedConcept ?conceptWord2.
    ?conceptWord1 core:isCategoryOf category:nature.
    ?fragment1 rdf:type core:fragments;
    core:hasAssociatedConcept ?conceptWord2.
    ?conceptWord2 core:isCategoryOf category:power.
    }
    ORDER BY desc(?fragment)


    Sample results

  • prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
    prefix core: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/>
    prefix category: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/Category/>
    prefix abstractFigure: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/AbstractFigure/>
    SELECT ?fragment1 ?sentimentValue
    WHERE {
    ?fragment1 rdf:type core:fragments;
    core:positive_sentiment ?sentimentValue;
    core:hasAssociatedConcept ?conceptWord.
    ?conceptWord core:isCategoryOf category:providence.
    }
    ORDER BY desc(?sentimentValue)
    Limit 5


    Sample results

  • prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#>
    prefix core: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/>
    prefix category: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/Category/>
    prefix abstractFigure: <https://w3id.org/arco/ontology/core/AbstractFigure/>
    SELECT (count(?fragment1) as ?CitationCount)
    WHERE {
    ?fragment1 rdf:type core:fragments;
    core:hasAssociatedAgent core:Epictetus.
    }


    Sample results
Team

Team

The team behind the OntoMeditations project:

Victor Chaix

Chloe Papadopoulou

Eleonora Pasquale

Manu Srivastava