An ontology-based approach for IVE+VA

This paper proposes the use of ontologies to provide intelligent virtual environments with semantical information, which can be of great value to the virtual agents inhabiting the world. On the one hand, this approach allows us to define complex objects and to introduce semantic levels of detail that help the agents when sensing complex scenes. On the other hand, the object taxonomy established by the ontology of the world is also used to define general and reusable activities for the roles involved in the simulation. Finally, in order to verify the approach presented, we have developed an application example dealing with a virtual bar, where different actors are able to sense as well as interact efficiently with complex objects (e.g. cabinets, shelves, ...).