In this paper, we focus on applying sentiment analysis to resources from online art collections, by exploiting, as information source, tags intended as textual traces that visitors leave to comment artworks on social platforms. We present a framework where methods and tools from a set of disciplines, ranging from Semantic and Social Web to Natural Language Processing, provide us the building blocks for creating a semantic social space to organize artworks according to an ontology of emotions. The ontology is inspired by the Plutchik’s circumplex model, a well-founded psychological model of human emotions. Users can be involved in the creation of the emotional space, through a graphical interactive interface. The development of such semantic space enables new ways of accessing and exploring art collections. The affective categorization model and the emotion detection output are encoded into W3C ontology languages. This gives us the twofold advantage to enable tractable reasoning on detected emotions and related artworks, and to foster the interoperability and integration of tools developed in the Semantic Web and Linked Data community. The proposal has been evaluated against a real-word case study, a dataset of tagged multimedia artworks from the ArsMeteo Italian online collection, and validated through a user study. 
Ontology-based affective models to organize artworks in the social semantic web