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 demonstrate an open-source natural language generation engine that produces descriptions of entities and classes in English and Greek from OWL ontologies that have been annotated with linguistic and user modeling information expressed in RDF. We also demonstrate an accompanying plug-in for the Protege ontology editor, which can be used to create the ontology's annotations and generate previews of the resulting texts by invoking the generation engine. The engine has been embedded in robots acting as museum tour guides in the physical world and in Second Life; here we demonstrate the latter application.  We describe initial work on building a virtual gallery, within Second Life, which can automatically tailor itself to an individual visitor, responding to their abilities, interests, preferences or history of interaction. The description of an object in the virtual world can be personalised to suit the beginner or the expert, varying how it is said—via the choice of language (such as English or Greek), the words, or the complexity of sentences—as well as what is said—by taking into account what else has been seen or described already. The guide delivering the descriptions can remain disembodied, or be embodied as a robotic avatar.