Semantic virtual environments

Today's Virtual Environment (VE) systems share a number of issues with the HTML-based World Wide Web. Their content is usually designed for presentation to humans, and thus is not suitable for machine access. This is complicated by the large number of different data models and network protocols in use. Accordingly, it is difficult to develop VE software, such as agents, services, and tools.In this paper we adopt the Semantic Web idea to the field of virtual environments. Using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) we establish a machine-understandable abstraction of existing VE systems --- the Semantic Virtual Environments (SVE). On this basis it is possible to develop system-independent software, which could even operate across VE system boundaries.

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