Virtual and Real-World Ontology Services

Both augmented-reality and virtual world applications must model semantic knowledge about real- or virtual world objects. The current generation of virtual world platforms provides limited facilities for representing this kind of knowledge, but a next generation will provide the means to tie semantic information to general or application-specific ontology services. This article motivates the need for ontology services, outlines several approaches for associating ontology concepts with objects and locations, and discusses how to populate common-sense ontologies using data harvested from real and virtual worlds.