StimSeqOnt: An ontology for formal description of multimedia stimuli sequences

Sequences of multimedia documents are successfully used in laboratory settings and in practice to deliberately elicit specific emotional reactions. To ensure a successful experiment the emotion provoking stimuli must be selected carefully and have a specific order in which they are presented to the participants. Temporal aspect – duration of individual stimuli within sequences, duration of whole sequences and pauses between stimuli and sequences – must also be chosen with great care. Construction of effective sequences is a delicate and time consuming activity which requires significant group manual effort from domain experts. To facilitate this task we propose a new ontology called StimSeqOnt for formal description of stimuli sequences. The ontology is written in OWL DL language and provides formal and sufficiently expressive representation of affective concepts, high- level semantics, stimuli documents, multimedia formats and repositories used. In StimSeqOnt all relevant metadata about stimuli sequences may be stored as formal concepts. If available, elicited physiological data of previously exposed participants are available for comparison thereby enabling prediction of emotional responses. The StimSeqOnt is designed in compliance with ontology guidelines to facilitate sharing and reuse of expert knowledge.