Constructing the virtual Jing-Hang Grand Canal with onto-draw

Constructing virtual 3D historical scenes from literature and records is a very challenging problem due to the difficulty in incorporating different types of domain knowledge into the modeling system. The domain knowledge comes from different experts, including: architects, historians, rendering artists, user interface designers and computer engineers. In this paper we investigate the problem of automatically generating drawings of ancient scenes by ontologies extracted from these domains. We introduce a framework called onto-draw to generate semantic models of desired scenes by constructing hierarchical ontology concept domains. Inconsistencies among them are resolved via an iterative refinement algorithm. We implement the onto-draw based ontology design approach and inconsistency removal technique in the virtual Jing-Hang Grand Canal construction project (Chen et al., 2010) and achieve encouraging results.