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.
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.