Since the popularisation of the Internet in the 1990s, the cyberspace has kept evolving. We have created various computer-mediated virtual environments including social networks, video conferencing, virtual 3D worlds (e.g., VR Chat), augmented reality applications (e.g., Pokemon Go), and Non-Fungible Token Games (e.g., Upland). Such virtual environments, albeit non-perpetual and unconnected, have bought us various degrees of digital transformation. The term `metaverse' has been coined to further facilitate the digital transformation in every aspect of our physical lives. At the core of the metaverse stands the vision of an immersive Internet as a gigantic, unified, persistent, and shared realm. While the metaverse may seem futuristic, catalysed by emerging technologies such as Extended Reality, 5G, and Artificial Intelligence, the digital `big bang' of our cyberspace is not far away. This survey paper presents the first effort to offer a comprehensive framework that examines the latest metaverse development under the dimensions of state-of-the-art technologies and metaverse ecosystems, and illustrates the possibility of the digital `big bang'. First, technologies are the enablers that drive the transition from the current Internet to the metaverse. We thus examine eight enabling technologies rigorously - Extended Reality, User Interactivity (Human-Computer Interaction), Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Computer Vision, IoT and Robotics, Edge and Cloud computing, and Future Mobile Networks. In terms of applications, the metaverse ecosystem allows human users to live and play within a self-sustaining, persistent, and shared realm. Therefore, we discuss six user-centric factors -- Avatar, Content Creation, Virtual Economy, Social Acceptability, Security and Privacy, and Trust and Accountability. Finally, we propose a concrete research agenda for the development of the metaverse.

All One Needs to Know about Metaverse: A Complete Survey on Technological Singularity, Virtual Ecosystem, and Research Agenda

Ontology engineering and knowledge services for agriculture domain

The current and future challenges of sustainable development require a massive transformation of habits and behaviors in the whole society at many levels. This demands a change of perspectives, priorities, and practices that can only result from the development of more aware, informed, and instructed communities and individuals. The field of design for sustainable behavior is answering this need through the development of products, systems, and services to support the change of people’s habits and decision-making processes. In this regard, Virtual Reality (VR) is a promising tool: it has already been explored to drive sustainable behavior change in several situations, through a wide range of devices, technologies, and modalities. This variety provides uncountable opportunities to designers, but it comes with a series of ethical, psychological, and technical questions. Hence, VR developers should be able to distinguish and identify possible strategies, delivering suitable solutions for each case study. In this work, we present a framework for the development of VR experiences to support sustainable behavior change, based on a systematic review. We consider the various features to manage and possible alternatives when creating a VR experience, linking them to the behavioral aspects that can be addressed according to the project’s aim. The framework will provide designers with a tool to explore and orient themselves towards possible sets of optimal choices generating tailored solutions.

Exploring the Use of Virtual Reality to Support Environmentally Sustainable Behavior: A Framework to Design Experiences

The AGROVOC Concept Scheme : A Walkthrough

The success of machine represented web known as semantic web largely hinges on ontologies. Ontology is a data modeling technique for structured data repository premised on collection of concepts with their semantic relationships and constraints on domain. There are existing methodologies to aid ontology development process. However, there is no single correct ontology design methodology. Therefore, this paper aims to present a review on existing ontology development approaches for different domains with the goal of identifying individual methodology’s weakness and suggests for hybridization in order to strengthen ontology development in terms of its content and constructions correctness. The analysis and comparison of the review were carried out by considering these criteria but not limited to: activities of each method, the initial domain of the methodology, ontology created from scratch or reuse, frequently used ontology management tools based on literature, subject granularity, and usage across different platforms. This review based on the literature showed some approaches that exhibit the required principles of ontology engineering in tandem with software development principles. Nonetheless, the review still noted some gaps among the methodologies that when bridged or hybridized a better correctness of ontology development would be achieved in building intelligent system.

/pdf/a-review-on-ontology-development-methodologies-for-3cdchqp96e.pdf

A Review on Ontology Development Methodologies for Developing Ontological Knowledge Representation Systems for various Domains

Ontology plays an important role in the enhancement performance of systems, addressing issues such as knowledge sharing, knowledge aggregation as well as information
retrieval and question answering. This paper presents the AGROVOC Concept Server
Workbench (ACSW) for multilingual ontological concept construction and maintenance. The ACSW is a web 2.0 based application consisting of two main functionalities that are user management and ontological knowledge management (i.e. concept, scheme, relationship, export, search, validate and consistency check) in order to maintain the knowledge acquisition
life-cycle in food and agriculture domain. Knowledge is stored in the form of multilingual concept hierarchy and also kept in the OWL format in order to exchange between machines and to do reasoning. This workbench uses Protege API as an OWL framework. Moreover the Ontology Game conceptual framework is also presented in order to acquire ontology terms
more pleasant.

The AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench: A collaborative tool for managing multilingual knowledge

Agriculture, while of uttermost importance for society, may also have a strong negative impact on the environment. Hence we propose a game that offers players the opportunity to experience the effects of different styles of agriculture on the environment. The game was built with the purpose of promoting the awareness of agriculture issues, such as, (1) the impact of fertilizers in sources of fresh water, (2) the problems related to deforestation and impact on the weather, and (3) the importance of balancing environmental and economic perspectives in order to produce food of good quality with low impact on the environment—and at the same time keep the activity sustainable. To make players care about these issues, we added a direct impact of the players' actions on a population of non-player characters, the villagers, whose simple autonomous behaviors resemble that of living entities. The game was implemented in the multi-user online three-dimensional (3-D) virtual world platform Open-Simulator, which supports an immersive user experience and high accessibility. An experiment was performed and showed that the game improved players' knowledge about agriculture and their awareness of the environmental impact of agriculture.

/pdf/agrivillage-a-game-to-foster-awareness-of-the-environmental-38ohra3bhe.pdf

AgriVillage: A Game to Foster Awareness of the Environmental Impact of Agriculture

An ontological knowledge management system requires dynamic and encapsulating operation in order to share knowledge among communities. The key to success of knowledge sharing in the field of agriculture is using and sharing agreed terminologies such as ontological knowledge especially in multiple languages. This paper proposes a workbench with three authoring tools for collaborative multilingual ontological knowledge construction and maintenance, in order to add value and support communities in the field of food and agriculture. The framework consists of the multilingual ontological knowledge construction and maintenance workbench platform, which composes of ontological knowledge management and user management, and three ontological knowledge authoring tools. The authoring tools used are two ontology extraction tools, ATOM and KULEX, and one ontology integration tool.

/pdf/workbench-with-authoring-tools-for-collaborative-multi-468asz3llf.pdf

Panita Yongyuth

Papers

The AGROVOC Concept Server Workbench: A collaborative tool for managing multilingual knowledge

AgriVillage: A Game to Foster Awareness of the Environmental Impact of Agriculture

Workbench with Authoring Tools for Collaborative Multi-lingual Ontological Knowledge Construction and Maintenance.