Position statement for the panel on creative computing: Reconciling objective precision with subjective ambiguity - Using the semantic web technologies to support automatic animation

We propose to use Semantic Web technologies to support the automatic generation of 3D computer animations. One of our projects is in the domain of Chinese traditional architecture. More precisely, the user describes in natural language the house he/she wants to build, and our system eventually generates an animation to demonstrate how the timber structure is constructed by every single piece of wood. The processing in between includes information retrieval, reasoning of various types of components needed, computation of the size and position of every wood in the 3D scene, reasoning of construction sequence, and generation of animation descriptions. We have built a knowledge base consisting of one ontology and four rule bases to support the whole automation. Different Semantic Web formalisms are used including OWL DL, SWRL and Jess language. The inference engine Pellet is used to ensure the logical consistency of the ontology, and the rule engine Jess to implement the size and position computation and sequence reasoning. Our experience in using the Semantic Web technologies in real-world systems validates their prominent advantages including the reasoning facilities and modeling tools. At the meantime, limitations are revealed including low efficiency in processing large knowledge bases.