CCOnto: The Character Computing Ontology

Especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic which is influencing human behavior, it is clear that there is a rising need for joining psychology and computer science to provide technology interventions for people suffering from negative feelings and behavior change. Behavior is driven by an individual’s character and the situation they are in, according to Character Computing and the Character-Behavior-Situation (CBS) triad. Accordingly, we developed the first full ontology modeling the CBS triad with the aim of providing domain experts with an intelligent interface for modeling, testing, and unifying hypotheses on the interactions between character, behavior, and situation. The ontology consists of a core module modeling character-based interactions and use-case and domain-specific modules. It was developed by computer scientists and psychology domain experts following an iterative process. The main contributions of this paper include updating the earlier prototypical version of the ontology-based on feedback from psychology experts and existing literature, adding more tools to it for enabling domain expert interaction, and providing the final ontology. Steps taken towards evaluating and validating the ontology are outlined.