Organizing Artworks in an Ontology-based Semantic Affective Space

In this paper, we focus on applying sentiment analysis to resources from online collections, by exploiting, as information source, tags intended as textual traces that visitors leave for commenting artworks on social platforms. Our aim is to create a semantic social space where artworks can be dynamically organized according to an ontology of emotions. We propose to tackle this issue in a semantic web setting, through the development of an ontology of emotional categories based on Plutchik’s circumplex model, a well-founded psychological model of human emotions. The ontology has been conceived for categorizing emotiondenoting words and has been populated with Italian terms. The capability of detecting emotions in artworks can foster the development of emotion-aware search engines, emotional tag clouds or interactive map of emotions, which could enable new ways of accessing and exploring art collections. First experiments on tags and artworks from the ArsMeteo Italian web portal are discussed.