Automatic Data Exchange and Synchronization for Knowledge-Based Intelligent Virtual Environments

Abstract

Advanced VR simulation systems are composed of several components with independent and heterogeneously structured databases. To guarantee a closed and consistent world simulation, flexible and robust data exchange between these components has to be realized. This multiple database problem is well known in many distributed application domains, but it is central for VR setups composed of diverse simulation components. Particularly complicated is the exchange between object-centered and graph-based representation formats, where entity attributes may be distributed over the graph structure. This article presents an abstract declarative attribute representation concept, which handles different representation formats uniformly and enables automatic data exchange and synchronization between them. This mechanism is tailored to support the integration of a central knowledge component, which provides a uniform representation of the accumulated knowledge of the several simulation components involved. This component handles the incoming-possibly conflicting-world changes propagated by the diverse components. It becomes the central instance for process flow synchronization of several autonomous evaluation loops.