An Implementation of Spatio-Temporal Graph to Represent Situations in the Virtual World

In this paper, we develop a Spatio-Temporal graph as of a key component of our knowledge representation Scheme. We design an integrated representation scheme to depict not only present and past but future in parallel with the spaces in an effective and intuitive manner. An event in general occupies not only a space but a time. Hence a crucial premise for the simulation of virtual situations is to position events in the multi-dimensional context, that is, 3-D space extended by the temporal dimension. Furthermore an event tends to have physical, social and mental aspects intertwined. As a result we need diverse information structures and functions to model entities and relations associated with events and to describe situations in different stances or perspectives of the virtual agents. These structures and functions are implemented in terms of integrated and intuitive representation schemes at different levels such as Ontology View, Instance View, ST View, Reality View. The resulting multi-dimensional comprehensive knowledge structure accommodates multi-layered virtual world developing in the time to maximize the diversity of situations in the historical context. The viability of this knowledge representation scheme is demonstrated with a typical scenario applied to a simulator implemented based on the ST Graph. The virtual stage based on the ST graph can be used to provide natural contexts for situated learning or next-generation simulation games.