Domain Ontology-based Management of Virtual Scenes

In recent years, some people have tried to incorporate semantics into virtual scenes in order to create virtual environments close to the real world as much as possible. Our purpose in writing this paper is to present the OntSceneBuilder object-oriented software system that uses any domain ontology for visualization and management of the virtual scenes. The ontology provides a precise specification of the concepts and their relations of a domain. Each concept is associated with 2D and 3D resources and a virtual artifact. The graph of the virtual artifacts forms a virtual scene of a virtual exposition. This paper therefore presents some models of the system development process, mainly realized during the analysis and design activities. Our aim was to analyze the OntSceneBuilder from the functional and interactional viewpoints and to create its software use case diagram. Furthermore, each software use case was designed from the structural and dynamical viewpoints. At the same time we also constructed the system software architecture. Some classes of the software architecture manage the concepts of the domain ontology associated with the topic chosen by user. The system functioning has been tested to construct virtual scenes of a virtual historic exposition. Key-Words: Virtual scene, domain ontology, concept, virtual artifact, software analysis, software architecture, virtual historic exposition