An ontology for description of emotional cues

There is a great variety of theoretical models of emotions and implementation technologies which can be used in the design of affective computers. Consequently, designers and researchers usually made practical choices of models and develop ad-hoc solutions that sometimes lack flexibility. In this paper we introduce a generic approach to modeling emotional cues. The main component of our approach is the ontology of emotional cues. The concepts in the ontology are grouped into three global modules representing three layers of emotions’ detection or production: the emotion module, the emotional cue module, and the media module. The emotion module defines emotions as represented with emotional cues. The emotional cue module describes external emotional representations in terms of media properties. The media module describes basic media properties important for emotional cues. Proposed ontology enables flexible description of emotional cues at different levels of abstraction. This approach could serve as a guide for the flexible design of affective devices independently of the starting model and the final way of implementation.