EmotionsOnto: an ontology for developing affective applications

Abstract

EmotionsOnto is a generic ontology for describing emotions and their detection and expression systems taking contextual and multimodal elements into account. The ontology is proposed as a way to develop an easily computerizable and flexible formal model. Moreover, it is based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL) standard, which also makes ontologies easily shareable and extensible. Once formalized as an ontology, the knowledge about emotions can be used in order to make computers more personalised and adapted to users' needs. The ontology has been validated and evaluated by means of an applications based on a emotions-aware Tangible User Interface (TUI). The TUI is guided by emotion knowledge previously gathered using the same TUI and modelled using EmotionsOnto.