The Potential of Ontology-Based Serious Game Design for the AEC Domain

Abstract

The term “Serious Gaming” or “Gaming with a purpose” describes the combination of game concepts and methods with other information technologies in “serious” fields of applications. In the context of the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) domain Serious Games have the potential to achieve additional value beyond pure entertainment. During the game design process the thematic background (in the presented case the AEC background) of a Serious Game is of particular importance. This requires domain-specific knowledge, usually represented by domain-experts (civil engineers and architects) as part of the game development team. A challenging task of the design process is the creation of game objects to model the game world. In the presented case these game objects are based on common AEC objects (like wall, floor, window, door etc.) with some additional information about their role in the game scenario like interactive behavior or different states during the game timeline. To enhance the AEC objects information about the implicit meaning of each object is required. This includes a time-consuming reasoning and decision-making process based on the experts experience in the application domain. However, it is assumed that this currently limits the application of Serious Gaming in the AEC domain. To solve this problem the presented research approach tries to retrieve most of the required knowledge automatically form a knowledge base (KB). This KB consists of digital content, which is already created during the Building Information Modeling (BIM) process. The challenge here is to displace the interpretation of information from the expert into a computer system. This requires a formalization of knowledge that could be derived from existing data and captured by an ontology, including a set of concepts and relationships between those concepts within the application domain. The present chapter introduces an ontology-based approach to support Serious Game design by enabling automatic creation of game design documents and game content using BIM data as a KB. For creating the KB for the presented use case, single AEC objects were enriched with additional information (e.g. events for interaction, animations, artwork, textures) about their role in the game with semantic technologies. This approach has the potential, that Serious Gaming becomes a common engineering method for daily practice, because data that are already incurred in the BIM process can be integrated and reused with minor effort.