Methodology for Engineering Affective Social Applications

Abstract

Affective applications are becoming increasingly mainstream in entertainment and education. Yet, current techniques for building such applications are limited, and the maintenance and use of affect is in essence handcrafted in each application. The Koko architecture describes middleware that reduces the burden of incorporating affect into applications, thereby enabling developers to concentrate on the functional and creative aspects of their applications. Further, Koko includes a methodology for creating affective social applications, called Koko-ASM. Specifically, it incorporates expressive communicative acts, and uses them to guide the design of an affective social application. With respect to agent-oriented software engineering, Koko contributes a methodology that incorporates expressives. The inclusion of expressives, which are largely ignored in conventional approaches, expands the scope of AOSE to affective applications.