Ontologies in Gaming

In an effort to learn about new ontology tools I made a small ontology to help me do just that. And I decided to use Pokemon since I am somewhat familiar with the Pokemon Go game. It is a nice diversion when one is waiting at the doctor’s office or that unusual moment when you just have some downtime. This started to make me think about ontologies in the gaming industry, and this is what I found out.

The gaming industry has been struggling with interoperability between games, in that gaming has no single solution to share information between games or gaming services. This has caused the industry to look to ontologies to fill this gap, and there have been some realizations while doing this. Besides having increased interoperability between games, gaming companies realized that they could now collect statistical data on gamers and game play making the games more enjoyable. It has also allowed gaming companies to see the e-commerce benefits as well, in that in-game products can be semantically modeled to enhance their visibility for purchase in-game.

With the possibility of gaming ontologies explored this brings us back to our original inspiration the Pokemon ontology or Pokemontology as I like to call it. Here I decided to model the first generation starters with their evolutions and move sets. And at this point I decided to concentrate on the Squirtle evolution, but I plan on modeling more as the Pokemon universe is very prolific and always evolving just like ontologies. So please stay tuned as I continue to add to my Pokemontology. And as always please feel free to visit my business website https://jatang.wixsite.com/knowledgegraphs to see my portfolio and to get ideas on how ontologies can benefit your own organization.