[vworld-tech] VWorld Ontology

Richard richard at ccpgames.com
Wed Apr 14 00:52:13 PDT 2004


> From: Jim Purbrick [mailto:Jpurbrick at climaxgroup.com]
> What are the axioms of virtual worlds?

I know its not necessarily the direction Jim was going with this,
but is anyone else working on formalising the axioms for their
virtual world in order to base its functionality on an inference
engine?

This is something that I have started doing recently.  I haven't
made that much progress, but I would be interested in discussing
some of the technical aspects and the approaches that can be taken
if it is of interest to anyone else.

The approach I have taken is to enumerate all the possible actions
that entities can take, all the objects that can exist within the
world I am creating and to abstract all the common elements and
rules from them.  I hope to either take the axioms and relate them
to the existing ontology in OpenCyc or to use them as standalone.
But for now using them within OpenCyc is the approach I am going
to take for the sake of having something that works.

I've pretty much decided how the spatial environment is going to
work and how its going to be integrated with OpenCyc, although not
having any experience in this area, I do have my doubts.  It is
tempting to just go with a simple location based system and to
store the locations of objects within OpenCyc, but given the
desire to have a 3D spatial environment, from what I have read,
it seems to me that the best approach is to store that data
externally to the ontology and perhaps access it through what
in OpenCyc is known as a HL module, where the use of a predicate
looks externally for data.  Although the documentation for OpenCyc
does leave some doubt as to whether HL modules are at a level
where they are ready for use.

Regardless of whether the use of an inference engine turns out to
be practical, coming up with the list of objects, actions and the
information extracted from them suitable for use in an ontology
for logical inference looks to be useful either way.  Its possible
we can generate a good part of our game logic code from it. 
Instead of changing the code, I'd just change the information
and regenerate the relevant code.  Its such a useful information
to have formalised that I am sure there are a wealth of
possibilities for it.

Anyway, I have a long way to go on this. I have made some progress
in the approach I have described but I have a lot to learn about
OpenCyc and not enough time or attention span to make as much
as I would like.

Any thoughts?
Richard.


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