A Semantic Approach to Virtual World Standards

Three main approaches exist for virtual world standardization: interoperability, infrastructure, and semantic markup languages. Most standards efforts to date have concentrated on virtual worlds' graphical aspects rather than their semantic content. Here, the author uses an example audio-only virtual world to reveal the advantages of defining any virtual world in semantic terms, so it can be realized in various ways - for example, by graphics or audio. Examples of semantic markup already used in conjunction with virtual worlds indicate that this approach is promising.