An Ontology for Managing a Virtual Environment for Risk Prevention

In this paper we present how we combine artificial intelligence and knowledge engineering to provide an ontology inspired approach in order to manage a virtual environment for risk prevention. In the virtual environment, different entities cohabit: virtual operators represented by cognitive agents and the learner’s avatar that represents a real operator. They can interact with the objects through actions and modify their state. It is therefore useful to have on one hand a system that specifically defines the framework in which the interactions or actions are allowed and on the other hand a representation of the knowledge involved in such interactions. The ontology models the objects of the environment, the agents operating in the environment, the events that can happen, the actions and the relations between all such concepts. We proposed an agent, COLOMBO, containing the developed ontology and a set of reasoning rules.