I the last ten days I had the pleasure to visit DERI Institute in Galway, Ireland. While you might be surprised by the lack of my, almost traditional “checklist for a true hedonist”, it is actually the combination of a perfect working environment and truly pleasant people that filled the pleasure dimension of the visit.

In this country of green, of wet snails in the night and cherry blossoms covered with drops of dew in sunlight, I presented my work on Online Presence (you can see the presentation on Slideshare). This time the focus was on my current work on Faceted Presence – the exploration of the fact that people sometimes want to appear differently to different groups of online contacts. The work includes a user study (results will be summarized soon) aimed at discovering the ways people group their contacts and what content do they dedicate to which group in which situation.

However, the highlight of the talk was the presentation “Beyond Social Semantic Web” where I argued that the development of the Semantic Web to date has taken a course of supporting Left Brain functions while it completely neglected emotions, creativity, context – functions of the right Brain.

I also introduced the idea how this situation can be changed and what would be a step on the right. The solution resides in emotions already scattered all over the Web in the form of smileys. I presented the idea of Smiley Ontology that can be used to make the semantics of smileys explicit. Morover, having semantic descriptions of emotions enclosed in smileys might reveal users emotional and affective state at the time of creating certain Web content. The possible connection between Smiley Ontology, SIOC and OPO could make open new possibilities to mapping users ‘emotions and users’ current context with the help of semantics already present in user generated content.

Many thanks to Alex for organizing this visit, and to all other people from DERI for all the inspiring discussions and valuable comments (especially John and Uldis).