The Avatar in the Context of Intelligent Social Semantic Web

When the first articles about the SemanticWeb (SW) appeared, there were hardly any signals that the next revolution would be related to social networking. Social networking services (SNS) have grown after MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook were launched in 2003- 2004 and combine text, images, movies, music, animations and all sorts of lists to create personal presentation pages for users, means to connect to real or virtual friends from all over the world and recommendations based on trust. The rise of the Social Semantic Web and the convergence of different media to create rich experiences is one of the most interesting paradigm shift in the last decades because the probable effect of this movement is the fact that in one day virtual meetings will become legitimate in all aspects of our daily lives (if they are not already). The most important question in this context (the one that we try to answer in this paper) is related to how people will try to shape and use their avatars. In order to understand this, we will study the links between multimodal ontologies, affective interfaces, social data portability and other recent findings. This paper starts with a survey of the current literature of the field, examines some social semantic web mechanisms that changed the way we think about SNs and in the end discusses some methods of connecting emotions with the social semantic web which pose some interesting questions related to the use of avatars. Between conclusions, one of the most interesting is the one that states that the use of affective interfaces adds value to the multimodal ontologies, while another suggests that the avatar must be a mediator between different technologies.