1. Introduction
What are emotions? Humans are feeling emotions every day, but they can still encounter difficulties understanding them. Emotions have been studied in various disciplines, from psychology to neuroscience. Collecting and integrating this interdisciplinary knowledge is challenging. In this paper, we integrated interdisciplinary knowledge about emotions from various domains (see
Figure 1) such as neurosciences (e.g., neurobiology), physiology, and psychology (affective sciences, positive psychology, cognitive psychology, psychophysiology, neuropsychology, etc.). To organize the knowledge, we employ technologies such as Artificial Intelligence with knowledge graphs and semantic reasoning. Furthermore, Internet of Things (IoT) technologies can help to acquire physiological data knowledge. To facilitate the interoperability between sensors, software, and data, standards are also employed. In fact, the integration of heterogeneous technologies, and sensors requires an interoperable solution to describe sensors and data exchange. If the enterprises do not develop the full stack that is compatible from sensors to the final application for consumers as well as compatible with other solutions, they can fail. It demonstrates the need for interoperability between sensors, software, and the data processed. In this paper,
we focused on data semantic interoperability to deduce meaningful information, which was applied to the IoT-based emotion domain.Ontologies in affective science are disseminated on the web (or even unshared) in different formats and different structures. Ontologies have been developed in AI to facilitate knowledge sharing and reuse. “An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization” according to Gruber et al [
1]. Ontology methodologies such as 101 ontology methodology [
2] and NeOn [
3] encourage reusing existing ontologies. Knowledge Graph (
shorturl.at/duz28, accessed on 17 September 2022) [
4,
5] is the new term, which was popularized by Google.
Finding, reusing and adding explicit mapping are time-consuming challenging tasks. The goal of this paper is to aggregate and make interoperable the interdisciplinary knowledge and implement it within the Emotional Knowledge Graph (EmoKG). To illustrate the use of our Emotion Knowledge Graph, we build the emotion naturopathy recommender system that suggests food to boost emotion (e.g., chocolate contains magnesium that is recommended when we feel depressed). The recommender system also answers a set of competency questions such as what are the basic emotions and the more sophisticated ones, what are the neurotransmitters and hormones related to emotions, etc. The recommender system can be extended to address other advice such as aromatherapy and take into consideration medical devices to monitor patients’ vital signals related to emotions and mental health.
Recommendation Systems (RS) [
6,
7] are embedded in the services that we are employing every day (e.g., videos with YouTube, products with Amazon, and movies with Netflix). RS system surveys (machine learning-based RS [
8]) [
9,
10,
11] do not focus on emotions to enhance our mental health. Nouh et al. [
12] introduce the research need for Well-being RS. Garcia et al. [
13] survey mental health services using IoT devices. There is still a research gap to design IoT-based emotional RS for mental health. There are several kinds of recommendation systems: (1) content-based (CB), which comes from information retrieval and information filtering; (2) collaborative filtering (CF), which predicts item utility for a specific user based on the items rated by other users in the past; (3)
knowledge-based, which we focus on in this paper; and (4) hybrid approaches.
There is a need to design an emotional knowledge graph to be employed within a knowledge-based recommender system to boost mental health. To reuse past expertise and follow FAIR principles [
14], the EmoKG emotional knowledge graph is mapped to existing knowledge bases found on the BioPortal biomedical ontology catalog such as SNOMEDCT, FMA, RXNORM, MedDRA, and also from emotion ontologies (when available online). We design the LOV4IoT-Emotion ontology catalog that encourages researchers to apply FAIR principles [
15] by releasing online their (emotion) ontologies, datasets, rules, etc.
The set of emotion ontology codes shared online can be semi-automatically processed; if the ontology code is not available yet, the scientific publications describing the emotion ontologies are semi-automatically processed with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to feed the emotion reasoning engine and build the naturopathy recommender system.
We address the following research questions (RQ):
RQ1: Can we reuse the domain expertise, and what are the shortcomings of past ontology-based emotion IoT projects?
RQ2: What are the sensors used in the emotion domain? Are there standardized sensor emotion dictionaries? Is there emotion ontology supported by standards?
RQ3: What are the AI technologies (e.g., rule-based inference engine) to deduce meaningful information from emotion sensor data so developers can design faster IoT-based emotion services?
RQ4: How to prove the veracity of the reasoning engine?
The key contributions of our research are:
C1: Ontology-based emotion projects shared though the LOV4IoT-Emotion ontology catalog tool (
Table 1); it addresses RQ1 in
Section 3.3.
C2: The emotion sensor dictionary is aligned with the ETSI SmartM2M SAREF for eHealth Aging Well (SAREFEHAW) standard ontology; it addresses RQ2 in
Section 4.2.
C3: Retrieval of emotional knowledge by the reasoner, used in emotion scenarios; it addresses RQ4 in
Section 4.
C4: Provenance that keeps track of the knowledge designed by domain experts which is explicitly encoded in the ontology catalog and rule datasets to prove the veracity of the reasoning engine; it addresses RQ4 in
Section 3.6.
C5: Standardization-compliancy: Lessons learned from semantic interoperability are disseminated within the
ISO/IEC 21823-3 IoT semantic interoperability [
16], and the Alliance for the Internet of Things Innovation (AIOTI) Standardization WG (
https://aioti.eu/aioti-wg03-reports-on-iot-standards/, accessed on 17 September 2022), which includes the Semantic Interoperability Expert Group [
17,
18] where the rule-based inference engine is taken as a baseline [
19]. SAREF designers are also members of AIOTI Standard WG. AIOTI has other subgroups such as as
AIOTI Health WG and
AIOTI Urban Living WG. Furthermore, to implement the emotional knowledge graph, we employ semantic web technologies (RDF, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL), which are
W3C standards.
Structure of the paper: Related work on emotion ontologies and IoT-based emotional projects are described in
Section 2. Interconnecting interdisciplinary emotional knowledge is described in
Section 3, which includes the set of competency questions and the ontology catalog for emotions. The emotional recommender system is described in
Section 4, which includes the sensor dictionary for emotion, its reasoner and emotion scenarios. Evaluation is included in
Section 5. The paper concludes and envisions future work in
Section 6.
2. Related Work: Ontology and IoT-Based Emotion Aware Recommender Systems
Existing surveys on emotion ontology-based projects are investigated in
Section 2.1. We selected a set of emotion ontology-based projects since the ontology code is shared online in
Section 2.2. Well-being recommender systems are introduced in
Section 2.3. Shortcomings of the literature study are summarized in
Section 2.4. More than 20 ontology-based emotion projects are sumamrized in
Table 1, including those not sharing online the ontology code. Additional information about ontology-based emotion projects can be found in
Appendix A.
2.1. Existing Surveys on Ontology-Based Emotion Aware Projects
Twenty ontology-based affective state projects which include affective state influences (Abaalkhail et al. [
31]) are reviewed. In our paper, we synthesize the work in
Table 1, and we focus on the availability on ontologies, reasoning employed within the project, and sensors employed.
2.2. Selected Ontology-Based Emotion Aware Projects Due to Ontology Availability
We collected the ontology-based emotion projects that share online the ontology code and emphasize them in this section.
Emotion Ontology (EMO) (Hastings et al. [22]) describes types of emotion for the affective science domain. EMO is aligned with Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and the Ontology of Mental Disease (OMD).
Mental health and disease ontologies (MFOEM) (Hastings et al. [48]) provides a taxonomy of emotions. Affective science, psychology, and the psychiatric domains are interconnected with the Mental Functioning Ontology (MF) (Larsen, Hastings et al. [
23]), which describes concepts such as consciousness, perception, thinking, and believing. Within their state of the art [
23]), only few ontologies are mentioned, such as Gene Ontology (GO) and Hastings’s ontology [
48]. For this reason, we deeply investigated ontology-based emotion projects (see
Table 1).
Patient-facing software tool, based on Visualized Emotion Ontology (VEO) and Emotion and Mood Ontology (Lin et al. [24,25]) describes and references 25 emotions and their visualizations to enhance patient interaction in clinical environments. The Visualized Emotion Ontology is based on the revised Ortony, Clore, and Collins’ models of emotions (OCC model). OntoKeeper is used to evaluate ontology quality.
EEG neuroheadset-based online learning used the Emotion and Cognition ontology to understand emotions (Gil et al. [26]).
Bodily expression-based emotion detection uses the Emotion Ontology (EmOCA) for Context Awareness (Berthelon et al. [28,29]). The ontology references six emotions and focuses on describing philia/phobia and their impact on emotion. Reasoning is achived with the CORESE inference engine, a SPARQL request, and the regression algorithm. This ontology-based motion detection is experimented with six men and four women between 20 and 36 years old.
Emotion annotation of corpora using Web of Data (Linked data) is achieved within the Eurosentiment EU FP7 project, which develops the Onyx ontology (Sanchez-Rada et al. [30]). The Onyx ontology is aligned with the Provenance Ontology, Lexicon Model for Ontologies (LEMON), EmotionML, NLP Interchange Format (NIF), OpenAnnotation, and WordNet-Affect. Differences between Onyx and Human Emotion Ontology (HEO) from Grassi et al. [
42] are analyzed. Automatic reasoning, based on SPIN rules, enables: (1) composition of emotions such as Anticipation and Joy result in Optimism, and (2) applying categories based on the dimensions of an emotion.
Conclusion: Finding and reusing the right emotion ontology for our needs is challenging. There is a need for more tools to help choose the ontology fitting our needs and encouraging ontology best practices with FAIR pinciples.
2.3. Well-Being Recommendation Systems
Well-being recommendation systems are summarized in Table “Well-being and IoT-based emotion applications (positive and negative) related work synthesis” within our past publication [
49].
Healthy food smart Recommender System of Hybrid Learning (SRHL) [
12] personalizes well-being and prevents diseases. The hybrid RS (content-based and collaborative filtering) employs unsupervised machine learning algorithms and considers time, activity, location, monetary costs, ingredients, health, nutritional value, availability, and the effects of combining the ingredients.
A personalized well-being and health-care support system, called MiningMinds [
50], is a rule-based system used in 40 contextual scenarios varying in location, activity, weather, and emotion. MiningMinds is evaluated with forty users (thirty males, ten females in the middle-aged group: 25–49 years, ten different nationalities) and ten domain experts.
The
I-Wellness personalized therapy Recommender System [
51] is a hybrid Case-Based Reasoning (CBR), integrated within wellness websites, which helps users search for personalized therapy treatment based on their health condition. The I-Wellness online system arranges flexible appointments for patients with a wellness center. I-Wellness comprises six modules: (1) user wellness information, (2) wellness recommendation, (3) package selection, (4) appointment scheduling, (5) point allocation, and (6) wellness monitoring. The prototype is not accessible online to be tested.
A
healthy and active lifestyle personalized context-aware RS Android smartphone application, called Motivate [
52], recommends twenty types of activities according to location, agenda, weather, profile (e.g., can cycle), and time. The Motivate application is evaluated from 15 November to 25 December 2010 (5 weeks) with six Android phone participants (five male, one female, range: 24–63 years) that are colleagues or friends and worked five days a week. Five participants have a healthy weight body mass index (BMI), and one is slightly overweight.
Conclusion: Those recommender systems use contextual information but do not exploit the emotions of the users. Recommender systems for enhancing people’s emotion and mental health are still lacking.
2.4. Limitations of the Ontology and IoT-Based Emotion Aware Literature Study
We summarize the following shortcomings of the ontology and IoT-based emotion aware state of the art analysis:
Recommender systems use contextual information but do not exploit the emotions of the users. Recommender systems for enhancing people’s emotion and mental health are still lacking.
There are emotion-aware recommendation systems for music but not for mental health nor using IoT (Abdul et al. [
53]).
There is no emotion knowledge graph considering neurotransmitters, hormones and relationships to physiological data (e.g., heart rate).
There is no standard emotion ontology.
Reviewing the state of the art is a time-consuming task. There is a need to share the literature analysis innovatively (e.g., an emotion knowledge repository supported by tools) to ease the work of other researchers. The ontology-based emotion projects are classified in
Table 1.
Few ontologies can be semi-automatically analyzed, since numerous ontologies are not accessible online. There is a need to disseminate ontology best practices such as FAIR principles [
14] for better ontology analysis to semi-automatically extract emotional-based domain knowledge.
There is a lack of research tools shared as open-source (e.g., web service, web application) that can be easily reused to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the applications illustrating the research use cases.
NLP techniques are applied on texts for sentiment analysis (e.g., Twitter, comments on blogs, etc.) rather than emotion ontologies or scientific publications describing ontologies.
Explicit descriptions of food that boost emotion are missing within ontology-based emotion-aware systems.
There is no naturopathy recommender system to boost emotion and mental health.
3. Interconnecting Interdisciplinary Emotional Knowledge
Interconnecting interdisciplinary emotional knowledge is described in
Section 3.1. Competency questions are introduced in
Section 3.2. An ontology-based IoT project catalog for emotion is presented in
Section 3.3. Knowledge extraction from emotion ontologies is described in
Section 3.4. Mapping to existing knowledge bases such as SNOMEDCT, FMA, RXNORM, MedDRA, LOINC, etc. and Emotion Ontologies is explained in
Section 3.5. Provenance of the data is explained in
Section 3.6. FAIR principles are introduced in
Section 3.7. Finally, lessons learnt from automatic extraction or mapping are summarized in
Section 3.8.
3.1. Interconnecting Interdisciplinary Emotional Knowledge
We investigated emotional-related knowledge from various interdisciplinary domains, as shown in
Figure 1 and listed below. Note that we cited numerous books (in French); this is due to the availability of resources to investigate them. Moreover, we mainly focus on chapters related to emotion within those books.
Affective Computing (Picard et al. [
54] with a focus on emotion recognition by robots and wearable computers).
- –
IoT for Emotions (in our past publication [
55], see table on Well-being and IoT-based emotion applications (positive and negative)).
- –
Internet of Robotic Things for Emotions (see our past publication on the Agile Co-Creation of Robots for Ageing (ACCRA) H2020 European project [
49]).
Artificial Intelligence with a focus on Knowledge Engineering (e.g., emotion ontologies) (Ontology Catalog for Emotion in
Section 3.3).
Biology
- –
Human Physiology (Silverthorn et al. [
56]).
- –
Psychobiology (Breedlove et al. [
57]).
- –
Neurosciences (Purves et al. [
58]—chapter on emotions and chapter on neurotransmitters), brain and behavior (Kolb et al. [
59]). We focused on neurosciences to understand better neurotransmitters relevant for emotions.
- –
Neurobiology of emotions (Belzung et al. [
60,
61]), brain chemistry with hormones (Loretta Graziano Breuning et al. [
62] focuses on happy brain with serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphin hormones).
- –
Epigenetics [63]: Impact of emotions on DNA (Zammatteo et al. [
64]).
- –
Endocrinology to describe hormones. Endocrinology chapters can be found in physiology books (Silverthorn et al. [
56]).
Psychology:
- –
Brain, Chemistry and Psychology relationships (Virol et al. [
65]).
- –
Affective Sciences (Hastings et al. [
22] design an emotion ontology, Lisa Feldman Barrett et al. [
66,
67] focus also on the physiology of emotions).
- –
Understanding human emotions from facial expressions (Ekman et al. [
68]).
- –
Cognitive Psychology (Lieury et al. [
69]).
- –
Psychophysiology (Morange-Majoux et al. [
70]).
- –
Neuropsychology (Roger Gil et al. [
71]—chapter on neuropsychology of emotions).
- –
Positive Psychology (Seligman et al. [
72,
73], Lecomte et al. [
74], Palazzolo et al. [
75]. We also have an interest in positive psychology at work (Arnaud et al. [
76], Chief Happiness Officer from Motte et al. [
77]).
- –
Emotion Regulation (Mikolajczak et al. [
78]).
- –
Emotional Intelligence (Goleman et al. [
79], Couzon et al. [
80]).
3.2. Competency Questions
We defined a set of Competency Questions (CQ) that will be answered within prototypes described in
Section 4.1:
CQ: What are the basic emotions according to Eckman et al. [
81]?
CQ: What are the neurotransmitters relevant for emotions?
CQ: What are the hormones relevant for emotions?
CQ: What are the hormones related to stress?
CQ: What are the hormones related to happiness?
CQ: What are the physiological parameters/sensors relevant to deduce (basic) emotions?
CQ: How to deduce meaningful information such as (basic) emotions from physiological data produced by sensors?
CQ: What are the ontologies describing emotions?
3.3. Ontology-Based IoT Project Catalog for Emotion: LOV4IoT-Emotion
We design the LOV4IoT-Emotion, which is an ontology-based IoT emotion project knowledge base (summarized in
Table 1) to release our state of the art analysis as an innovative and maintained tool. We are aware of Systematic Literature Review (SLR) guidelines such as [
82]. Other ontology catalogs such as
BioPortal [
20] and
Linked Open Vocabularies (LOV) [
21] are not focused on IoT-based emotions applications. LOV4IoT-Emotion is more focused on the ontologies and scientific publications, sensors, and reasoning mechanisms employed as detailed in
Table 1 which are not covered by other ontology catalogs. We continuously enrich the LOV4IoT ontology catalog [
83] and address more and more keywords such as affective science, well-being, etc. LOV4IoT-Emotion provides a dump of ontology code, web services, and web-based ontology catalog, which were released for the Knowledge Extraction for the Web of Things Challenge. The IoT-based emotion ontologies analysis is also employed within the reasoning discovery explained hereafter. To extract knowledge, manual and semi-automatic analysis are performed [
84,
85] (see
Section 3.4).
3.4. Knowledge Extraction from Emotion Ontologies
We semi-automatically analyzed the ontologies with Natural Language Processing techniques (NLP): (1) ontology code (RDF/XML) and (2) scientific publications describing the ontologies. When the ontologies can be processed, we selected a set of specific keywords (e.g., joy) to compare knowledge provided by ontologies.
From a set of publications on emotion ontology-based projects, we extract knowledge such as which sensors are employed, which reasoning mechanisms are used to interpret sensor measurements, is there an ontology available and reusable, etc. (as depicted in
Figure 2).
Ontologies are compared with each other to extract a common pattern to later generate a unified and federated emotional knowledge graph. As an example, we automatically retrieve key phrases (see
Figure 3) if they mention
emotion-related keywords such as: “fear”, “terror”, “anxiety”, “stress”, “stressed”, “despair”, “crying”, “anger”, “angry”, “irritation”, “joy”, “happy”, “happiness”, “pleasure”, “excited”, “calm”, “tired”, “bored”, “sad”, “disgust”, “love”, “surprise”, “hate”, “jealous”, “emotion”, “apraisal”, “guilt”, “sad”, “valence”, “face”. Since there is no corpus for such tasks, we have semi-manually built the gold dataset, as depicted in
Figure 3. Each column corresponds to an ontology, and each row represents an emotion-related term.
3.5. Mapping to Existing Knowledge Bases Such as SNOMED-CT, FMA, RXNORM, MedDRA, LOINC, MESH, GALEN, ChEBI, DBpedia, and Emotion Ontologies
We first describe key concepts related to hormones and neurotransmitters. We search on the Bioportal ontology catalog for key ontologies to be mapped with our Emotion Knowledge Graph. We found ontologies such as SNOMED-CT, Mapping Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA), RXNORM, MedDRA, Logical Observation Identifier Names and Code (LOINC), Medical Subject Headings (MESH), GALEN, and Chemical Entities of Biological Interest Ontology (ChEBI). The mappings of hormones and neurotransmitters are summarized in
Table 2 and
Table 3. We also use DBpedia due to its popularity and link emotion-related concepts to existing emotion ontologies when available online. Most of the emotion ontologies cannot be found on BioPortal; only the Hastings’s ontology [
22] is referenced on BioPortal.
3.5.1. Mapping to SNOMED-CT
Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine for Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) (
https://www.snomed.org/, accessed on 17 September 2022), designed by the College of American Pathologists, is the biggest biomedical ontology with more than 370,000 concepts. SNOMED-CT describes clinical terminology for patient electronic health records such as operations, diseases, devices, symptoms, treatments, and drugs. SNOMED-CT requires the payment of an annual fee to be used by health care organizations. SNOMED-CT is now part of UMLS.
We mapped Hormone, Neurotransmitter, Dopamine, Serotonin, Oxytocin, etc. classes to the ones from SNOMED-CT using
owl:equivalentClass property, since the URL names do not have an explicit name (they are numbers such as &SNOMEDCT;734617007). Adrenaline is mapped to SNOMED-CT via rdfs:seeAlso since the concept is “Epinephrine”.
Noradrenaline is mapped to SNOMED-CT via rdfs:seeAlso since the concept is “noradrenaline hydrochloride” and to “Norepinephrine”.
3.5.2. Mapping Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA)
Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) (
http://si.washington.edu/projects/fma, accessed on 17 September 2022) is an ontology-based knowledge base for biomedical informatics which defines the structural organization of the human body.
We mapped Hormone, Neurotransmitter, Dopamine, Serotonin, Oxytocin to the ones from FMA using owl:equivalentClass property, since the URL names do not have an explicit name (they are numbers such as &fma;fma12278). As an example, Glutamate was within FMA. Adrenaline is mapped to FMA via rdfs:seeAlso since the concept is “Epinephrine”. Noradrenaline is mapped to FMA
via rdfs:seeAlso since the concept is “Norepinephrine”.
3.5.3. Mapping to RXNORM
RxNorm (
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/rxnorm/index.html, accessed on 17 September 2022), part of UMLS, is maintained the by United States National Library of Medicine. It is a medicine terminology that describes clinical drugs. It is used to study drug-to-drug interactions, since a medical doctor cannot have a visibility of side effects on more than three medicines given to a patient. It is also used in personal health records applications.
We mapped Dopamine, Serotonin, Oxytocin, Glutamate to the concepts from RXNORM using the owl:equivalentClass property, since the URL names do not have an explicit name (they are numbers such as &RXNORM;7824). When the same terms are not found, we map the terms using the rdfs:seeAlso property: Cortisol is “cortisol succinate”, Endorphin is “beta-endorphin human”, Insulin is “insulin aspart, human/insulin degludec”, Noradrenaline is “Norepinephrine”.
3.5.4. Mapping to MedDRA
Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA) (
https://www.meddra.org/, accessed on 17 September 2022) is an internationally used standardized medical terminology that describes medical conditions, medicines and medical devices. MedDRA assists regulators for sharing medical products information used by humans.
We mapped concepts such as Dopamine, Oxytocin, and Glutamate to the concepts from MedDRA using the owl:equivalentClass property, since the URL names do not have an explicit name (they are numbers such as &MEDDRA;10033329). Other concepts are mapped using the rdfs:seeAlso property, since the terms are not exactly the same such as: Serotonin is “Serotonin syndrome”, Dopamine is “Dopamine urine”, Glucocorticoid is “Glucocorticoid decreased”, and Noradrenaline is “Serum noradrenaline increased”.
3.5.5. Mapping to Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes (LOINC)
Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes (LOINC) is a common language for identifying health measurements, observations, and clinical documents, but it is not used for diagnosis and diseases.
We mapped Dopamine, Serotonin, and Glutamate to the ones from LOINC using owl:equivalentClass property, since the URL names do not have an explicit name (they are numbers such as &LOINC;MTHU013002). Endorphin is mapped to LOINC via rdfs:seeAlso since the concept is “Beta endorphin”. Glucocorticoid is mapped to LOINC via rdfs:seeAlso since the concept is “Synthetic glucocorticoid drug”. Noradrenaline is mapped to LOINC via rdfs:seeAlso since the concept is “Norepinephrine”.
3.5.6. Mapping to Medical Subject Headings (MESH)
Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) (
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/meshhome.html accessed on 17 September 2022), part of the US NIH National Library of Medicine, is a thesaurus and vocabulary used for indexing, cataloging, and searching of biomedical and health-related information from MEDLINE/PubMed, the NLM Catalog, and other NLM databases.
We mapped concepts such as Dopamine, Serotonin, Oxytocin, Cortisol,
Prolactin, Insulin, Aldosterone, and Testosterone, etc. to the concepts from Medical Subject Headings (MESH) using the owl:equivalentClass property. The MESH ontology does not provide an explicit name within URLs (e.g., &mesh;D000450). Oestrogen is found within MESH as “estrogens”. Other concepts are mapped to MESH using the rdfs:seeAlso property, since we do not find an exact match of the term: Noradrenaline is “noradrenaline sulfate”, Adrenaline is adrenaline sulfate, Endorphin is “endorphin, humoral”, Glutamate is “Glutamic Acid”, Neurotransmitter is “Neurotransmitter Agents”. We did not find the concept Hormone with Mesh.
3.5.7. Mapping to GALEN
Generalised Architecture for Languages, Encyclopaedias, and Nomenclatures in medicine (GALEN) (
https://opengalen.org/, accessed on 17 September 2022) was a European Union project (1992–1999) which provides an ontology that describes medical concepts for clinical systems. It became the OpenGALEN foundation, and 2020 marks OpenGALEN’s 30th anniversary. GALEN provides more than 25,000 concepts. GALEN can be used to describe medical procedures.
We mapped Hormone, Neurotransmitter, Serotonin Dopamine, cortisol, etc. to the ceoncepts from GALEN using owl:equivalentClass property. The GALEN ontology provides an explicit name (e.g., galen:Hormone). Oxytocin and glutamate were not found.
3.5.8. Mapping to Chemical Entities of Biological Interest Ontology (ChEBI)
Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) (
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ChEBI/, accessed on 17 September 2022) is a chemical ontology from the Open Biomedical Ontologies effort at the European Bioinformatics Institute.
We mapped concepts such as Neurotransmitter, Dopamine, Serotonin, Oxytocin, Cortisol, Adrenaline, Insulin, Prolactin, Noradrenaline, Aldosterone,
Testosterone, etc. to the concepts from ChEBI using the owl:equivalentClass property. The ChEBI ontology does not provide an explicit name within URLs (e.g., ChEBI:ChEBI_50114). Other concepts do not have the exact same term such as: Oestrogen is estrogen, Endorphin is “beta-endorphin”, and Glutamate is “glutamate(2)”.
3.5.9. Mapping to DBpedia
DBpedia is the semantic Wikipedia. It covers various domains but is less specific to the biomedical domain. DBpedia is not well known in the biomedical domain (not referenced within the Bioportal ontology catalog). However, it is intensively used as it is proven by the Linked Open Data cloud (
https://lod-cloud.net/, accessed on 17 September 2022) or the Linked Open Vocabularies ontology catalog (
https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov/vocabs/dbpedia-owl, accessed on 17 September 2022), which shows that DBpedia ontology has been used in at least 18 ontologies, uses 19 external ontologies, and it is used in at least 15 datasets.
Due to its popularity and numerous tools using DBpedia, we decided to map to DBpedia. We mainly used
rdfs:seeAlso to map to terms such as Emotion Neurotransmitter. For instance,
<rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="https://dbpedia.org/page/Emotion"/>, accessed on 17 September 2022). DBpedia uses the term Glutamic_acid for glutamate. Noradrenaline is mapped to Norepinephrine from DBpedia. Oestrogen is mapped to Estrogen from DBpedia.
3.5.10. Mapping to Emotion Ontologies
Our emotional knowledge graph adds explicit links to existing emotion ontologies:
Emotion Ontology (EmOCA) for Context Awareness (Berthelon et al. [
28] (
http://ns.inria.fr/emoca/emoca.rdfs, accessed on 17 September 2022)) since it references six basic emotions: joy, fear, disgust, anger, sadness, surprise, and other concepts such as valence and arousal.
Visualized Emotion Ontology (VEO) (Lin et al. [
24,
25]) (
https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/VEO accessed on 17 September 2022) for concepts such as Emotion, Fear, Surprise, Anger, Disgust, Pride, Interest, Pleased, Joy, Hope, Admiration, Disappointment, Distress, Hate, Shame, etc.
We explicitly added links such as <owl:equivalentClass rdf:resource = “obo;MFOEM_ 000053”/> or <rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource = “obo;MFOEM_000196”/>
When the ontology code is not available, we enrich our emotional knowledge graph with more knowledge while reading the scientific papers. For instance, the taxonomy of mood states (see
Figure A9) is based on Zenonos et al. [
86] that references eight mood states that can be recognized: Excited, Happy, Calm, Tired, Bored, Sad, Stressed, Angry. We explicitly write the source of the knowledge within our knowledge graph to keep track of the provenance of data.
3.6. Keeping Track of Provenance Metadata
To keep track of the source of knowledge, we explicitly add this information within the rule RDF dataset and LOV4IoT RDF dataset as shown in
Listing 1 by referring to the scientific publication in
rdfs:comment and the link to the scientific paper with
prov:hadPrimarySource from the W3C PROV-O ontology. For instance,
prov:hadPrimarySource keeps track of the source by providing the URL of the scientific publication mentioning the rule or reasoning mechanism.
Listing 1.
Adding provenance metadata using the W3C PROV Ontology.
Listing 1.
Adding provenance metadata using the W3C PROV Ontology.
To describe the rule dataset itself, we use the Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) as shown in
Listing 2.
Listing 2.
Describing the rule dataset using the Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT).
Listing 2.
Describing the rule dataset using the Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT).
Table 4 reminds of the namespaces used: the first column for the prefix name, the second column for the namespace description, and the third column for the ontology namespace URL.
3.7. FAIR Principles
Findable, Accesssible, Interoperable, Resuable (FAIR) principles [
14] encourage researchers to share their reproducible experiments by publishing online the resources such as ontologies, datasets, rules, etc. The set of ontology code available online can be automatically processed; if the ontology code is not available, the scientific publications describing the emotion ontologies are semi-automatically processed with Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to feed the emotion reasoning engine to build the recommender system. As we mentioned earlier, the LOV4IoT-Emotion ontology catalog (
Section 3.3) encourages FAIR principles.
3.8. Lessons Learnt from Automatic Extraction or Mapping
We encountered a set of errors while conducting automatic extraction or mapping:
Dead ontology URL. The ontology URL was mentioned in the scientific paper but is not available anymore. For this reason, it is important to encourage better FAIR principles (e.g., findable resources).
The ontology cannot be loaded. Errors such as Unable to complete the HTTP request are encountered. There are also issues when dealing with ontology code generated with various ontology editors, libraries, etc. in various formats such as RDF/XML, RDF/Turtle.
The ontology can be loaded but no terms for automatic extraction can be found. It can happen when there are no label or comments within the ontology or when the ontology URL was automatically built (e.g., MEDDRA;10033329).
To map the ontologies, we have to deal with synonyms as well.
Picking the right ontology fitting our need is challenging; numerous ontologies can cover the same terms, but all terms that we need are not covered in only one ontology.
5. Evaluation: Applying Semantic Web Best Practices to Enhance the Emotional Knowledge Graph
We employed our designed PerfecO methodology [
91] that references a set of semantic web best practices and collection of tools providing web services to evaluate ontologies to enhance our emotional knowledge graph: (1) Syntactic Ontology Evaluation in
Section 5.1, (2) ontology design evaluation in
Section 5.2, (3) LOV4IoT-Emotion Ontology Catalog statistics in
Section 5.3, and (4) the emotional knowledge graph evaluated with emotion scenarios in
Section 5.4.
5.1. Syntactic Ontology Evaluation
The ontology can be loaded with Jena version 2.11, Protege 4.3 (
Figure 5 and
Figure 6), and GraphDB 9.10 (
Figure 7). We evaluated our emotion ontology with the
TripleChecker syntax validator in May 2022. Mistakes found such as “Literal value does not match datatype” (data format and decimal format) have been fixed.
5.2. Ontology Design Evaluation
We evaluated our emotion ontology with
OOPS! OntOlogy Pitfall Scanner! [
92], which detects pitfalls. We have identified eleven pitfalls, which are classified as critical, important or minor:
One critical pitfall: P31 Defining wrong equivalent classes.
Four important pitfalls: P10 Missing disjointness, P34 Untyped class, P38 No owl ontology declaration, and P30 Equivalent classes not explicitly declared.
Six minor pitfalls: P04 Creating unconnected ontology elements, P08 Missing annotation, P20 Missing ontology annotations, P22 Using different naming conventions in the ontology, P32 Several classes with the same label, P36 URI contains file extension.
We are currently fixing the pitfalls. To fix P30 Equivalent classes not explicitly declared, we use rdfs:seeAlso instead of owl:equivalentClass.
Regarding P30 Equivalent classes not explicitly declared, we disagree, Hastings et al. distinguish Joy (MFOEM_000034) from Pleasure (MFOEM_000035). For this reason, we kept both as separate concepts.
For the P34 Untyped class pitfall, we need to import the relevant ontologies: Hastings et al. FMA, VOAF, emoca, SNOMEDCT, MedDRA, RXNORM, VEO, etc.
We also added ontology metadata (
Figure 8 and
Listing 4) to our emotion ontology as recommended by the Linked Open Vocabularies ontology catalog [
21].
Listing 4.
Ontology Metadata Code Example of the Emotion Ontology.
Listing 4.
Ontology Metadata Code Example of the Emotion Ontology.
To enhance
clarity, we provide
rdfs:label and
rdfs:comment to explicitly describe concepts in natural language and even provide the source of the knowledge using the PROV-O ontology (as explained in
Section 3.6).
To ensure
deferencable URI, we tested the ontology with
Vapour [
93] to test the availability of the ontology on servers (e.g., deferencable URI). Deferencing Entity URI (without content negociation) passed (
Figure 9). However, we can enhance availability by providing other sources such as HTML, JSON-LD, RDF/XML, and TURTLE. Moreover,
http://sensormeasurement.appspot.com/ont/m3/emotion.owl (accessed on 17 September 2022) can be downloaded, but the server configuration must be improved. We are using Google Application Engine to host the application online, with web services running, and obtain the DNS name.
5.3. LOV4IoT-Emotion Ontology Catalog: Page View Statistics
The LOV4IoT-Emotion web page has been visited 5511 times (3987 as unique views) between January 2018, and March 2022 according to Google Analytics (
Figure 10). Visitors return to this dataset which demonstrates its usefulness. To make the GUI more appealing, there is still a need for front-end developers. The results are encouraging to update the dataset with additional domains and ontologies.
StandICT.eu 2023 Standardized Ontology Landscape: Another similar action to collect standardized ontologies is under development within the StandICT.eu 2023 project. A landscape on standardized ontologies should be released before the end of 2022.
5.4. Emotional Knowledge Graph Evaluated with Emotion Scenarios
A subset of emotional-related scenarios has been introduced in
Section 4.4. More and more scenarios are integrated.
Rules are implemented and employed within the emotion scenarios (see
Table 6 for demonstrator’s URLs such as sensor discovery, rule discovery, emotion ontology, etc.).
Technical Evaluation We summarize 16 rules that encourage ontology best practices in
Table 7, so researchers will enhance the reusability and better interoperability of their emotion knowledge [
91]. Each rule is associated with bad practices and best practice examples to ease the task of beginners in their learning journey (Step-by-step tutorial to improve the ontology quality, dissemination, reuse, etc. Semantic Web Best Practices:
https://goo.gl/Rg4cGr, accessed on 18 September 2022) [
94]. We also disseminated those best practices to ISO SC 42 Artificial Intelligence within ISO/IEC 5392 Knowledge Engineering Reference Architecture (KERA) and the Ontologies, Knowledge Engineering, and Representation (OKER) Report.
6. Conclusions and Future Work
Designing cross-domain emotion applications requires acquiring knowledge from different communities (e.g., affective sciences, affective computing, biology, neurosciences, psychology, physiology, psychophysiology, neuropsychology, etc.). We extended our sensor dictionary for the emotion domain. For each sensor, we discover related knowledge, extract rules, make rules compliant with our sensor dictionary, and integrate rules in a emotion-based scenario. Domain knowledge is also extracted from our LOV4IoT-Emotion IoT-based ontology catalog, referencing more than 49 projects (in March 2022). LOV4IoT reuses the domain expertise from past ontology-based emotion IoT projects. Integrating machine interpretable knowledge implemented within ontologies helps when domain experts are not available. We contributed to standards (e.g., we are editors of the ISO/IEC 21823-3 IoT semantic interoperability), Alliances for IoT such as AIOTI (Standard WG-IoT Semantic Interoperability sub-group, Health WG, and Urban WG), and (European) projects such as AI4EU, ACCRA and StandICT.eu 2023.
Mid-term challenges: There is not yet any emotion ontology that is standardized. The emotion knowledge graph could be disseminated more within standards such as W3C, ISO, NIST, IEEE, etc.
Long-term challenges: Deducing meaningful knowledge from IoT physiological data produced by sensors using more sophisticated AI technologies. Our SAREF-compliant semantic reasoning uses AI techniques such as knowledge and rule-based reasoning, but it could be enhanced addressing more sophisticated scenarios (e.g., dealing with ECG and EEG, which requires Machine Learning and Deep Learning). Encouraging more synergies among standards and communities (e.g., ETSI SmartM2M SAREF, W3C SOSA/SSN, W3C Web of Things, and iot.schema.org ) is partially addressed via the AIOTI Alliance and the StandICT project, and there is a need for more open-source tools, supports, etc.