Ontology

From Smiley Ontology

Based upon analysis of emoticons that are used in different social systems and following our motivations, we have developed a preliminary conceptual model of the Smiley Ontology. Although the current model is just a working draft, we consider that it integrates the main structural elements of an emoticon. The ontology is also available in OWL.

By looking through the prism of Smiley Layer Cake, we have observed structural elements of an emoticon.

Smiley Layer Cake

The meaning of an emoticon and its structure can be very deep, and by looking through the prism of Smiley Layer Cake we have observed its structural elements and semantics.

Smiley Layer Cake makes explicit the semantic elements of an emoticon. The Underlying Emotion represents the meaning of an emoticon - the message that the sender wants to pass, and the receiving party should get. It can have different meanings, all depending of the user and the context. The next layer, the Structure of the emoticon, tells us what it consists of – faces, objects, text etc. The top layer, Visual Appearance, describes what the emoticon looks like, its color and whether it is animated or not. The Layer Cake suggests that we can have different visual appearances for the same structure, and that is often the case.

As a materialization of an instance of this Layer Cake, there‟s a concrete emoticon from a particular system. It is a picture (e.g., jpg or gif) that encapsulates all the layers and is connected to the emoticon system of a specific SN, IM or some other online communication system (e.g., gTalk, Facebook etc.)

Design

The core class of the Smiley Ontology is the Emoticon class, which formally represents the concept of an emoticon. Each emoticon can be visually represented as a sequence of characters, a picture or both. So, in our model, we have introduced VisualRepresentation class. CharacterRepresentation and Picture are possible implementations of VisualRepresentation. An emoticon, can be animated or static and still carry the same meaning, thus the property isAnimated of the VisualRepresentation class is introduced.

As each IM, Social Network and any other social software tool uses predefined set of emoticons which are disposable for its users, we have defined the EmoticonSystem class as an assembly of emoticon instances originating from a specific social software tool. Each emoticon system uses its own pictures for depicting emoticons.

One of the most important connotations that an emoticon carries is emotion (Emotion class). Emoticon is often used to accentuate the emotional context of a sentence or the whole text. What is more, it is not a rare occasion that an emoticon even replaces the text entirely and does that not only that without the loose of emotional semantic, but it often makes the emotion clearer to the recipient.(e.g. setting status message just “:-(” clearly means being sad).

An emoticon does not need to be a single item (or just a face expression). It can consist of many fractions (EmoticonFraction class) that each has its own meaning:

• FacialExpression depicts human's face expression (e.g. happy face),
• Message represents a sequence of characters or a text (e.g. "I love you")
• Object represents an item (e.g. ball, clock) that an emoticon can contain.

Meaning of these fractions of an emoticon can vary significantly, but in general they can represent a State of emoticon fraction (e.g. ringing, sleeping). In addition, each fraction can be in some sort of relationship(s) with another one (e.g. smiley carrying sunglasses).