Collaborative learning environments bring together learners from different sociocultural contexts, around a common task. Besides, these environments are emotional places where learners frequently experience emotions and bring emotions that concern events from outside the learning environment. Moreover, learners express, handle and regulate their emotion differently according to the sociocultural context to which they belong. And as it was proven by empirical research studies, emotions can have important effects on students' learning and achievement. Therefore, Detecting, understanding, handling and regulating the learner emotion and understanding their cultural differences is a key issue that need to be tackled to enhance collaborative learning. To do so, we propose the emoculture ontology, a domain ontology for representing relevant aspects of affective phenomena and their culture differences in collaborative learning environments. In this paper, we will discuss first the concept of emotion and its relations with learning, collaborative learning and culture. Second, we will present a set of selected existing emotion ontologies which will be compared in the same section according to criteria relevant to our study. Third, we will describe the process upon which EmoCulture was built. Finally, we will discuss the quality of the proposed ontology and how it will be used in future works to guide the building of an emotional and cultural aware collaborative learning environment.
