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From Smiley Ontology
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways. – Scott Fahlman
Introduction
Since the very beginning of the Internet and communication via e-mails, instant messengers (IM) and other large number of services that eventually arise, people used emoticons (smileys) as one of the most useful, easiest, and interesting ways of expressing their emotions, state or action in some moment. As a textual portrayal of a one's mood or facial expression, people use emoticons when they e-mail a letter to a friend, in a chat with their pen pals, or when they want to comment on a blog post or a Facebook photo from a best friend’s birthday party. Shortly, whenever one wants to express himself, instead of typing too much, he will just use one simple concept – emoticons, and in many cases it will tell more than a thousand words. And nowadays, emoticons aren’t just a few simple characters and their combination. The concept of emoticon has evolved through years, so we see it as a fully colored picture, used to enrich text context or replace it entirely, thus bringing much richer experience to a user. It can be a facial expression,an object, or a piece of text, and can present a large number of activities, and even be animated.
Limits
There are a large number of different systems that enable the use of emoticons, and all of them have different collection of emoticons. If you pick up one emoticon from a one system, probably you will not find the same one in any other. The same thing stands for the semantics. It is often that there are plenty emoticons that are visually different, but they’re all semantically the same. Let’s take a look at few a scenarios:
- On his journey to Mexico, Filip met Akihiro, a student from Japan, and they became inseparable friends. Every time they’re on chat, they are a bit confused because they use different emoticons for the same emotion. For instance, Filip often uses :-) but for Akihiro it is common to write (^_^) when he is happy, and their messengers do not interpret them as the same smiley emoticon.
- Bryan feels like having a cup of coffee and he sets his status on Facebook “Bryan would like ~o)”. His friends who read his status understand that Bryan wants a coffee, but some application that crawls through user statuses can’t understand it and thus miss the chance to make use of it.
The Idea
The fact that different systems are using different set of emoticons, even for presenting the same emotion, state or action, and that the semantics of the emoticons is not accessible for automatic interpretation, points out that there is space for improvement. Therefore, we propose the use of
an ontology that aims to enable interchange of emoticons between different systems, without any loss of their semantics, as well as to allow for capturing and formal representation of semantics of emotions and emotional states that are widely spread across the Web.
More about Smiley Ontology
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