ha-tpb-mental-state-ontologies

OWL Ontologies that capture social behavior, behavioral challenges and stress management in children with autism. A Child Ontology and an Environment Ontology are shaped through knowledge elicitation studies with autism experts.

Theoretical framework: Theory of planned behavior

The ontologies are structured following motivational aspects of Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). TPB is a psychological theory for explaining and predicting an individual's intention to engage in a behavior at a specific time and place. The general idea is that an individual's beliefs about a behavior shapes the individual's attitudes, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control in the behavior, which in turn promotes or inhibits engagement in the behavior.

Ajzen, I. (1991). The theory of planned behavior. Organizational behavior and human decision processes, 50(2), 179-211.

Knowledge elicitation and interviews

The ontologies are the result of an interview study, scoped in the structure of TPB, with a set of autism experts. The aim of the interview study was to capture the expert's knowledge about how children with autism experiences social environments, and to find aspects of the environment that can be linked to stress and motivation. The participant group consists of licensed psychologists and special education teachers, all with experience in working with young children with autism. In a thematic analysis, the interview data was categorized, themed and analyzed. The data collection is summarized as what this study calls elements of stress, consisting of three categories: signs of stress, sources of stress, and management of stress.

The general idea of the knowledge graphs (ontologies) is to reason about observations; If a subset of the elements can be observed and recognized, then a software system can reason about the observations to make inferences regarding stress management. The ontologies can also define mental states, such as stress states, motivation and learnability which are linked to particular beliefs of the environment.

Explore the ontologies using the open-source ontology editor - Protege

• Download Protege: https://protege.stanford.edu/

• Install the OWLViz plugin for class hierarchy visualization: https://protegewiki.stanford.edu/wiki/OWLViz

• Open the files in Protege:
  > tpb-user-ontology.owl
  > tpb-environment-ontology.owl

• Explore: Classes, Object Properties and Data Protperties

Visual overview

• Get an illustrative overview of the ontologies by looking at the provided figures:
  > Figures/tpb-user-ontology.png
  > Figures/tpb-environment-ontology.png

Authors

• Andreas Brännström¹ {andreasb@cs.umu.se} Homepage
• Timotheus Kampik¹ {tkampik@cs.umu.se} Homepage
• Juan Carlos Nieves¹ {jcnieves@cs.umu.se} Homepage
• Erik Domellöf² {erik.domellof@umu.se} Homepage
• Limin Gu³ {limin.gu@umu.se} Homepage
• Monica Liljeström³ {monica.liljestrom@umu.se} Homepage

¹Department of Computing Science
²Department of Psychology
³Department of Education

Umeå university
SE-901 87, Umeå, Sweden