Knowledge representation: An ontology for managing a virtual environment

This paper presents an ontology developed in order to manage a virtual environment for risk prevention. This ontology represents the objects composing the environment, the agents operating in the environment and the events that can happened. In the virtual environment, different entities cohabit: virtual operators represented by cognitive agents and the learner's avatar that represents a real operator. They can interact with the objects. It is therefore useful to have on one hand a managing system that well define the framework in which the interactions or actions can be allowed and on the other hand a representation of the knowledge involve in such interactions. To do this, we combine artificial intelligence and knowledge engineering to propose agent COLOMBO. It is composed with the developed ontology and a set of reasoning rules.