  Affective multimedia documents such as images, sounds or videos elicit
emotional responses in exposed human subjects. These stimuli are stored in
affective multimedia databases and successfully used for a wide variety of
research in psychology and neuroscience in areas related to attention and
emotion processing. Although important all affective multimedia databases have
numerous deficiencies which impair their applicability. These problems, which
are brought forward in the paper, result in low recall and precision of
multimedia stimuli retrieval which makes creating emotion elicitation
procedures difficult and labor-intensive. To address these issues a new core
ontology STIMONT is introduced. The STIMONT is written in OWL-DL formalism and
extends W3C EmotionML format with an expressive and formal representation of
affective concepts, high-level semantics, stimuli document metadata and the
elicited physiology. The advantages of ontology in description of affective
multimedia stimuli are demonstrated in a document retrieval experiment and
compared against contemporary keyword-based querying methods. Also, a software
tool Intelligent Stimulus Generator for retrieval of affective multimedia and
construction of stimuli sequences is presented.
