In particular, the rules present in artificial envrionments such as DIS provide a form of "virtual physics" for any system operating in them [Rocha and Joslyn, 1998]. In virtual worlds whose historical legacies are derived from the rule-based production systems of classical artificial intelligence, these constraints are known as "ontologies" [Uschold and Gruninger, 1996]. The ontology of a virtual environment provides the background against which systems perceive symbols, make decisions, and in turn act back into those environments. In this way, these ontologies provide virtual environments, and allow the operation of virtual systems, which are semantically enriched or enabled, albeit in virtue of a (perhaps largely) artificial semantics.
The ontologies of DIS virtual environments such as a Web have traditionally been consciously imposed by designers (engineers and authors). We would also like to facilitate ontologies which can emerge in virtue of the interactions of human communities of users with whatever internal dynamics are allowed in the DIS.
The formal properties of the representational structures available in the DIS necessarily place severe constraints on the possible semantic structures which can be represented. Our assertion is that current hypertext systems as implemented in the HTTP/HTML protocols are entirely inadequate to allow the formation of emergent ontologies in DIS. We examine aspects of ontologies and the desirable properties of DIS to represent them. In particular, we introduce a number of potential developments:
Rocha, Luis M and Joslyn, Cliff: (1998) "Simulations of Evolving Embodied Semiosis: Emergent Semantics in Artificial Environments", in: Proc. 1998 Conf. on Virtual Worlds in Simulation, ed. C. Landauer and K. Bellman, pp.~233-238, Society for Computer Simulation, San Diego
Uschold, Mike and Gruninger, Michael [1996] "Ontologies: Principles, Methods and Applications'', Knowledge Engineering Review, vol. 11:2, pp. 93-136