Towards the Representation of Emotional Information from On-Line Collaborative Learning Sessions

There have been great efforts in the semantic web community so far in order to provide specifications, standards and ontologies to facilitate semantic processes in the web. Our aim is to take advantage of these works as much as possible for the purpose of modelling and representing information and knowledge of collaborative learning in the context of online web forums. To this end, an ontological framework that allows for representing information about collaborative activities realized using online web forums has been created and used to support the virtualization of collaborative sessions, creating animated storyboards that reproduce collaborative sessions from the web forums of virtual classrooms. Even though the information from the framework has proven to be enough to create animated storyboards, we realized that certain emotional information about the opinion (or the sentiment) of each user would be very useful in improving the final representation of the information. This paper presents an extension of a previous ontological framework to include emotional information about the sentiment and opinion of students when collaborating. The research reported in this paper is currently undertaken within a FP7 European project called ALICE.