GenderedOntoComedy: Toward a Gendered Representation of Literary Characters in the Dante's Commedia

In this paper we describe GenderedOntoComedy, an OWL 2 ontology for the gendered description of Dante’s female characters in the Divina Commedia. GenderedOntoComedy is the result of a transversal research activity integrating aspects from the fields of Gender Studies and Computer Science, focusing on an in-depth study of the representation of the female characters in Dante’s Commedia. GenderedOntoComedy extends the ontology GenderedCHContents which in turn is an extension of the Europeana Data Model, designed to draw attention to the extensive presence of women in the fields of Cultural Heritage. Furthermore, for the description of Divina Commedia, we rely on OntoComedySources, an ontology modeling iconographic and literary sources of the Divina Commedia. GenderedOntoComedy is an attempt to investigate the Ontology of Gender, in consideration that literary characters, whether historical or not, can create a gendered conceptual map of women’s representation through time.