We have designed and implemented an application running inside Second Life that supports user annotation of graphical objects and graphical visualization of concept ontologies, thus providing a formal, machine-accessible description of objects. As a result, we offer a platform that combines the graphical knowledge representation that is expected from a MUVE artifact with the semantic structure given by the Resource Framework Description (RDF) representation of information.
A somewhat different perspective was pursued by @cite_5 , who designed a tool, based on Ajax3D and that was mainly intended for X3D applications, for the semantic annotation and creation of navigation paths in virtual environments. Specific to the Second Life virtual environment is the work of @cite_7 . Their approach allows users to tag her own virtual objects. It is also possible to associate a piece of software, a so-called , to a virtual object thus allowing other users to freely tag it.
@cite_5 @cite_7
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Nowadays, more Virtual Environments (VEs) are becoming available on the Web. This means that VEs are becoming accessible to a larger and more diverse audience. It also means that it is more likely that the use of these VEs (i.e. how to interact with the virtual environment and the meanings of the associated virtual objects) may be different for different groups of persons. In order for a VE to be a success on the Web, end-users should easily get familiar with the VE and understand the meanings of its virtual objects. Otherwise, the end-user may be tempted to quit the VE. Therefore, annotations and the creation of navigation paths for virtual tour guides become important to ease the use of VEs. Most of the time, this is done by VR-experts and the annotations are very poor and often only text based. This paper describes an approach and associated tool that allows a layman to add or update annotations to existing VEs. In addition, annotations are not limited to text but may also be multimedia elements, i.e. images, videos, sounds. Furthermore, the approach (and the tool) also allows easy creation of navigation paths and tour guides, which can be used to adapt a VE to the needs of a user. The paper illustrates the results by means of a real case, which is a reconstruction of a coalmine site for a museum. We present semSL, an approach to bring Semantic Web technologies into Second Life. Second Life is a virtual 3D world, in which users can communicate, build objects, and explore the land of other users. There are different kinds of entities in Second Life, which can be locations, objects, or events. Many of these entities are of potential interest to users. However, searching for entities is difficult in Second Life, since there is only a very limited way to describe entities. With semSL it becomes possible for every user to add arbitrary tags or key value pair based descriptions to entities in Second Life, or to create typed links between entities. Such typed links can even be established between entities in Second Life and resources from the Semantic Web. The description data for all such entities is centrally stored at a server external to Second Life. The data is encoded in RDF, and is publicly accessible via a SPARQL endpoint. This should not only lead to significant improvements for searching operations, but will also allow for flexible data integration between data from semSL and data from other sources on the Semantic Web.