Have you considered adding balloon types?

[elkym]

Thought bubbles are distinct from speech bubbles in the predictable 'cloud', but there are many varieties.
Border types, color of text, color of background within bubble, etc.

Fun examples:
The shape of a balloons is sometimes custom to mark a theme (Grimm Fairy Tales card Queens have bubbles either shaped like or decorated by their suit symbols).

Professor X's telepathy bubbles are often thought bubbles with 'ports' of parallel lines that actually break the border of the bubble, usually found at the low points of the typical cloud shape.

This sort of internal structure is not highly emphasized by CBO, but I'm curious about such an implementation-- thinking of creating an example database of fictive neographies from comic books, and it would be useful to be able to label the type of 'textual space' that a distinguishable, but not always readable, textual thing appears. I'm considering that not all 'textual spaces' in a comic book fall clearly into the balloon or caption category, although examples do not come to mind.

[seanpetiya]

This is a very interesting idea — my first instinct would be to add additional sub-properties of cbo:balloon [1] (e.g. thought, dialogue, esp, etc.).

As for describing how a balloon/bubble is stylized, I might suggest adding a property to the cbo:Balloon class [2], if one of the inherited properties is not sufficient — cbo:Balloon inherits quite a bit of cbo:Comic and cbo:Sequence. I'm thinking of how Ghost Rider's speech is stylized — but it might be helpful to have more examples, and specifically examples of how those balloons might be described (e.g. "surrounded by flames").

Do you have a page or panel in mind you would like to reference? Professor X is a great example, especially because a lot of this thought bubbles are also dialogue between other mutants with ESP (Jean Grey, etc.).

[1] https://comicmeta.org/cbo/balloon.html
[2] https://comicmeta.org/cbo/Balloon.html

[elkym]

Ghost Rider is a pretty good example. His stylized speech bubbles tell the reader something-- and that stylization could theoretically be grouped with other similar approaches.

I think a descriptive space in the tag set makes sense, but precisely what would go there might need to refer to a controlled vocabulary that's project/archive specific.

A few examples that come to mind:
The Queens of Wonderland from the Grimm universe have speech bubbles in the shape and color of their card suit-- or are decorated with such:
https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Grimm-Fairy-Tales-presents-Wonderland-Clash-of-Queens/Issue-1?id=110910#9

Or, a more classic example-- the fluid borders of balloons at the bottom of the page here in ShockSuspenstories, indicating sentimental emotionality and distress:
https://readcomiconline.to/Comic/Shock-SuspenStories/Issue-14?id=107054#3

[seanpetiya]

These are great examples, and I'd like to start with Queens of Wonderland. This is the first complete description of a page I've done (including panels, balloons), so you will have to bear with me — but I've uploaded an RDF/XML example we can start with [1].

And you can use the W3C RDF validator to parse the triples and generate a graph [2].

I'll post an abbreviated version of the cbo:page node with a single cbo:panel here for discussion:

...
<cbo:page>
    <rdf:Description rdf:about="#ClashOfQueens_Issue01_Page09">
        <cbo:penciller>
            <rdf:Description rdf:about="#ManuelPreitano">
                <schema:name>Manuel Preitano</schema:name>
            </rdf:Description>
        </cbo:penciller>
        <cbo:sequence>
            <rdf:Description rdf:about="#ClashOfQueens_Issue01_Page09_Seq1">
                ...
                <cbo:panel>
                    <rdf:Description rdf:about="#ClashOfQueens_Issue01_Page09_Seq1_Panel2">
                        <cbo:balloon>
                            <rdf:Description rdf:about="#ClashOfQueens_Issue01_Page09_Seq1_Panel2_Balloon1">
                                <schema:text>The graves? What happened to the graves?</schema:text>
                            </rdf:Description>
                        </cbo:balloon>
                        <cbo:balloon>
                            <rdf:Description rdf:about="#ClashOfQueens_Issue01_Page09_Seq1_Panel2_Balloon2">
                                <schema:text>What indeed.</schema:text>
                            </rdf:Description>
                        </cbo:balloon>
                        <cbo:balloon>
                            <rdf:Description rdf:about="#ClashOfQueens_Issue01_Page09_Seq1_Panel2_Balloon3">
                                <schema:text>They were just here.</schema:text>
                            </rdf:Description>
                        </cbo:balloon>
                        <cbo:balloon>
                            <rdf:Description rdf:about="#ClashOfQueens_Issue01_Page09_Seq1_Panel2_Balloon4">
                                <schema:text>I know, my dear. My poor, sweet diamond queen.</schema:text>
                            </rdf:Description>
                        </cbo:balloon>
                    </rdf:Description>
                </cbo:panel>
                ...
            </rdf:Description>
        </cbo:sequence>
    </rdf:Description>
</cbo:page>
...

I've been using vocabularies like schema.org for general, non-comics specific properties like dates, titles, etc. and I think schema:text works well for describing the textual content of a balloon [3]. The domain for this property is schema:CreativeWork which aligns with the primary concept and definition of a "comic" in CBO: a visual and literary work of sequential art [4].

I think describing the visual style of the balloon could be done with a similar text property, and/or we can create a new object property that links to a controlled vocabulary as you suggest. Do you have any examples in mind? We can also "mint" URIs in the CBO vocab namespace like I've done for cbo:Condition [5] — see Individuals.

[1] https://github.com/comicmeta/ComicBookOntology/blob/master/examples/rdf-xml/example-grimmfairytales.rdf
[2] https://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/rdfval?URI=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubusercontent.com%2Fcomicmeta%2FComicBookOntology%2Fmaster%2Fexamples%2Frdf-xml%2Fexample-grimmfairytales.rdf&PARSE=Parse+URI%3A+&TRIPLES_AND_GRAPH=PRINT_BOTH&FORMAT=PNG_EMBED
[3] https://schema.org/text
[4] https://comicmeta.org/cbo/Comic.html
[5] https://comicmeta.org/cbo/Condition.html

[elkym]

What might be ideal is to find a database of icons-- that includes basic shapes, and utilize it for more things than just balloon shape or decorations. My first thought is to ask some graphic designers about libraries of shapes that they use, and see if the language and names they provide prove useful search terms for finding an open-source and/or scholarly database.

A preliminary search did turn up these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_two-dimensional_geometric_shapes
https://www.freeicons.io/filter/popular/all/diamonds

I'll see what else I can dig up.

[elkym]

I have found a number of possible collections that could serve in this manner.

The most notable is the the Noun Project:

UTF itself has a lot of interesting icons, and the collection is growing all the time, but it currently seems difficult to navigate-- there may be a lack of taxonomical or other relational functionality, and it covers quite a lot of abstract script characters and the like that seem less useful to have to sift and sort through. File Format Info for Unicode

Another notable project, a bit like the noun project, Material Designs Icons, seems a bit less well suited, but does have a notable selection and clean style.

[seanpetiya]

These are some great resources — I particularly like the list of two-dimensional geometric shapes from Wikipedia, because there would presumably be equivalent Wikidata URIs for each term (e.g. dodecagon - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q212074).

These examples focus on the visual shape of the balloon/bubble, so we can start with cbo:shape as a potential object property, with a definition like "Visual shape of a sequence", because I think it could also be used to describe the panel. And I do not see an equivalent property in schema.org.

I've gone ahead and turned my previous example into a "proposal" for describing balloon types, here's an abbreviated first attempt with a cbo:shape property:

...
<cbo:panel>
    <rdf:Description rdf:about="#ClashOfQueens_Issue01_Page09_Seq1_Panel3">
        <cbo:balloon>
            <rdf:Description rdf:about="#ClashOfQueens_Issue01_Page09_Seq1_Panel3_Balloon1">
                <schema:text>You don't remember, do you?</schema:text>
                <cbo:shape rdf:resource="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q193410"></cbo:shape>
            </rdf:Description>
        </cbo:balloon>
        <cbo:balloon>
            <rdf:Description rdf:about="#ClashOfQueens_Issue01_Page09_Seq1_Panel3_Balloon2">
                <schema:text>Remember? I-I don't understand.</schema:text>
                <cbo:shape rdf:resource="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q41159"></cbo:shape>
            </rdf:Description>
        </cbo:balloon>
    </rdf:Description>
</cbo:panel>
...

[elkym]

Wikidata alignment seems like a great long-term approach to this, but it may be very limited in application.
I think the Noun Project may have a subset of icons that would suit this pretty well.

Is there any reason that such an arrangement wouldn't work? It might be inconsistent to use 2 different shape sets-- but it makes sense to me that different shape sets might work for different projects.

Can you foresee issues or complexities here that I can't? (I'm still reasonably new to this.)

[seanpetiya]

I used Wikidata in my example because the URIs are dereferenceable [1] [2] [3], and it doesn't look like the Noun Project publishes RDF, JSON-LD, etc. data for the icons in the collection — unless I am missing this piece.

However, that doesn't mean you couldn't use URIs from the Noun Project for instances of cbo:shape, and I agree it would be inconsistent to use two shape sets, especially because the Noun Project seems like a pretty robust collection and is much easier to navigate.

I think the only potential issue I could see is the possibility that the Noun Project URIs change since they haven't been "minted" in the Linked Data sense — i.e., permanent. But I think there might be some creative ways around that.

Would you be able to share some examples from the subset of icons you have in mind? I could then update my cbo:shape example.

[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Data_access#Per-item_access_to_data)
[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/Q41159.jsonld
[3] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityData/Q41159.rdf