Springer LNCS SEGAP Project Draft

1. SEGAP
Semantic game platform
Ana Florescu, Catalin Cristian, Ilie Pandaciuc, Oana Calin
Faculty of Computer Science, UAIC, Iasi, November 2013
Keywords. wad, wade, segap, infoiasi, project, game, semantic
1
Why SEGAP?
Abstract. In our days, technology tends to gain more and more space in our
lives. We tend to reduce communications between “real people”, preferring to
have a “virtual life”.
Games have an important place in people's life. Some are used for relaxation,
for boredom, to improve intelligence but for some, games are a way of life.
Web browser games started to be more and more developed, competing with
the classical ones. In some cases browser game are more advantaged because
here where you don't need installation in order to play one.
In order to improve the game experience based on the player behaviour, we will
gather relevant information during the game that we are going to use in order to
offer suggestion/tips regarding the playing strategy that should be adopted, the
gamer activity will be monitored on all games that he will be playing , so a
global classification for all the games could be done.
Using specials ontologies, customised for the game purpose would facilitate the
easily spread around the world for all the gamers community – talking in a
common language.
1.1
State of the Art
In our days, technology tends to gain more and more space in our lives. We tend to
reduce communications between “real people”, preferring to have a “virtual life”.
Games have an important place in people's life. Some are used for relaxation, for
boredom, to improve intelligence but for some, games are a way of life. Web browser
games started to be more and more developed, competing with the classical ones. In

2. some cases browser game are more advantaged because here where you don't need
installation in order to play one.
In order to improve the game experience based on the player behaviour, we will
gather relevant information during the game that we are going to use in order to offer
suggestion/tips regarding the playing strategy that should be adopted, the gamer
activity will be monitored on all games that he will be playing , so a global
classification for all the games could be done.
Using specials ontologies, customised for the game purpose would facilitate the
easily spread around the world for all the gamers community – talking in a common
language.
1.2
What are we bringing?
Our approach will be focused on the player and on his work. We will provide
feedback to the gamers, so they can improve their game and results in relation to other
gamers, and help them find themselves opponents with similar skills.
We will offer a global view of the results and work done at every game for each
player. Each gamer will be able to see his work, his personal statistics : level, rewards,
won/lost battles, time spent etc. After that he will be able to analyze his results and
improve his work on the game platform.
Also, based on the information collected about a user (player skills, played games,
current game opponents, won/lost battles etc) the solution that we’ll provide will offer
good tips/advices before and during a game.
Our approach is coming with a semantic opening on a game entities and
parameters, by modelling with SPARQL queries and ontologies. Using these
technology we will be able to obtain complex relations between colected date, and
dispaly more accurate and usefull infomation for players. Among the advantages of
using RDF database and SPARQL query langauge there are: better query
performance, data integration, ontology reuse and choosing features based on rational
reasons.
The SPARQL queries will help us to gather specific information from and for the
player from our ontologies. We will be able to realise complex relations between the
collected data, and reveal useful information for the players.
We plan to collect information (position on the map, the weapons that he has,
won/lost battles, player skills, actions etc) from a player during a game and
retrieve/give him hints/suggestions, his position in the ranking, connection with other
players that might interest him (person from Iasi that plays Heroes on a specific land),
help them find opponents with similar skills.
1.3
Scope
This project will meet the following objectives:
─ improve the experience that a player might have while playing a game;
2

3. ─ enlarge the social network for players by making possible the connection between
people that share the same hobbies;
─ helps the player to make the best decision based on his previous behaviour and on
his current position in the game;
─ global review of the results and work done at every game for each player.
This project have the aim to improve the interactions between players when they
play a game, and in the same time we use the advantages offered by SPARQL.
Using the data collected from the user, we can give relevant information to the
player related to other players, or we can even give some hints in order to make it
easier for him to win.
2
Project concept
There will be three main types of resources available through RDF ontologies.
The theme resources, that describe the thematic of a game and its contents such as
variables, actions, entities or conditions.
A game resource is built on top of one or more templates and can use only action,
conditions, entities and variable templates that are present in the templates that it
inherits.
Player resources represent the actual gamers that are using/playing games that built
on themes.
Due to the fact that these themes are on top of any games, and, that a theme is a
known and established thing, SPARQL queries can be made in order to find certain
information about an ongoing game or make statistics and provide recommendations
based on the player history.
2.1
Theme
A theme or game theme represents the thematic of a game, a structures that defines
the baseline for a game. This is the base structure of the system. The traits defined
here can later be used for queries or as part of queries executed via SPARQL. The
bottom line is that a theme is the description (template) of a game genre or thematic.
Following is a description of the basic entities that compose a theme.
2.2
Theme general information
Each game theme will have some general information facts that are not directly
related to the ontology structure but are relevant as presentation details for the theme.
Those details are as follows:
- name
- description
- other information (such as tags or links)
3

4. 2.3
Theme Entities
This refers to a game entity, more specifically to an entity that is present only in
the current theme. An example of entity can be anything from a NPC to a building or
some other object.
2.4
Theme Variables
Variables are values that can be updated at the game client request during a match
or by the system on demand. Also there can be global parameters that can provide
overall information regarding a game. Variables can range from things like the
number of wins or the number of lost games, some skill classification depending on
the game to the current position of the player on the map.
2.5
Theme Actions
The actions of a game theme describe what actually can be done inside the game,
actions are the things that the player can do inside the game, the interaction with the
environment, for example, jump over walls, train units for his army, hide, attack
entity, etc. These are the actions that are specific for the current theme. These can
vary from game theme from game theme.
2.6
Theme Conditions
A condition can check what is needed for a match to start or to end. These checks
are mainly determined by the state of some already defined parameters such as an
action or the value of a variable. They can be done at request by the client or by the
system at a specified time or triggered by some event.
4

5. 3
Game
The game is the actual content of the platform. This is what is being used. The
game is derived from one or more themes and can only declare parameters that were
defined inside the themes it is based on. Players interact with games that in return
interact with them. The standard requirements for a game are described in this section.
3.1
Game general information
This is the standard game information that provides a basic overview and
presentation. It is not related to the game ontology structure directly, it is here only to
be used as a meaning to familiarize the players with the game and make a decision if
they are going to play or not.
- name
- developer
- publisher
- website
- description
5

6. - screenshots
- videos
3.2
Game specific characteristics
These guidelines are specific to a certain game only depending on the game theme
or themes:
- theme(s)
- actions (build constructions, train units, attack, defend, upgrade, etc)
- start conditions (location, resources, items, etc.)
- win/loose end conditions (location, resources, items, unit destroyed, actions done,
etc)
- entities
3.3
Game tips or advices
This type of information can be provided after evaluating some conditions at the
clients request in game or outside the game. For example if the player has lost a
certain amount of units in a strategy game he can be advised to create more of those
units to replace his lost ones. The tips are per game only. Each game must define its
own tips. In theory the tips are unique for each game.
4
Player
4.1
Player general information
This is the standard general player information that is being used in the system to
help other players to find other players with related interests, region, etc:
- name
- age
- country
- location (city, region, etc)
- website/blog
- social network information
- e-mail
- other details
4.2
Player Game related information
This is the information related to the player gaming experience, these parameters
are distinct for every game. The games fill in this information during gameplay. This
information is related to game parameters such as actions, conditions, variables and
entities.
Awards can be provided to the player during or after special events.
6

7. These are the parameters that a game client can send/retrieve updates about to/from
the API depending on the game theme, here is an example:
- player skill
- played games
- wins/loses
- current game parameters (player related information such as position, health,
inventory, units, etc)
- current game opponents
- overall game parameters (prefered region on a map, preferred weapon on a map,
etc)
- overall game opponents
4.3
Other players related information
This is the information related to the player social interaction regarding the games:
- friends
- groups
5
Technology
This section describes the frameworks that will be use to implement SEGAP. The
technologies listed here offer backbone on which the system will be built from the
data persistence level to the WEB UI.
5.1
Jena
Apache Jena (or Jena in short) is a free and open source Java framework for
building semantic web and Linked Data applications. The framework is composed of
different APIs interacting together to process RDF data.
7

8. Apache Jena will help us with persisting the our ontologies through TDB, query
them with AQL and expose RDF endpoint through Fuseki.
5.2
SPRING
The SPRING Framework will be used in order to create, expose and secure the
REST services present in the REST API.
Spring's web MVC framework is, like many other web MVC frameworks,
request-driven, designed around a central Servlet that dispatches requests to
controllers and offers other functionality that facilitates the development of web
applications.
8

9. SPRING Security will help in securing our REST services from unwanted access.
It will also interact with our web interface.
5.3
JSP
JavaServer Pages (also known as JSP) is a Java based technology specifically used
to help software developers serve dynamically generated web pages (such as HTML
and XML) as well as other document types pertinent to the development of interactive
web content.
9

10. 5.4
OWL/RDF/SPARQL
“The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation
languages or ontology languages for authoring ontologies or knowledge bases. The
languages are characterised by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations
for the Semantic Web.”
“SPARQL (pronounced "sparkle", a recursive acronym for SPARQL Protocol and
RDF Query Language) is an RDF query language, that is, a query language for
databases, able to retrieve and manipulate data stored in Resource Description
Framework format.”
SPARQL will be used to query our ontology and provide input based on those
queries.
5.5
HTML5/CSS3/RDFa/JavaScript/Ajax
HTML5 is a cooperation between the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and
the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG). HTML5 is
designed to deliver almost everything you want to do online without requiring
additional plugins. It does everything from animation to apps, music to movies, and
can also be used to build complicated applications that run in your browser.
These technologies will be used at a presentation level to develop the web interface
and also supply the user with information regarding various topics such as player to
player interaction and current status and statistics.
6
Tools
These tools are being actively used to progress with the project. They are helping
us implement, track, model, visualize and test our SEGAP application.
Protégé: - is a free, open-source, widely used Java based ontology editor that has
well documented tutorials. We can use Protégé to build domain models and
knowledge-base collections.
Graphviz - is open source graph visualization software. Graph visualization is a
way of representing structural information as diagrams of abstract graphs and
networks. It is used inside Protégé as a plugin to draw the ontology graph.
ArgoUML - is the leading open source UML modeling tool and includes support
for all standard UML 1.4 diagrams. It runs on any Java platform.
Google DOCS - Used as a common point to develop the project specifications.
NetBeans IDE - provides first-class comprehensive support for the newest Java
technologies and latest Java specification enhancements before other IDEs. It is the
10

11. first free IDE providing support for JDK 8 previews, JDK 7, Java EE 7 including its
related HTML5 enhancements, and JavaFX 2.
With its constantly improving Java Editor, many rich features and an extensive
range of tools, templates and samples, NetBeans IDE sets the standard for developing
with cutting edge technologies out of the box.
Mockingbird - is an online tool that makes it easy for you to create, link together,
preview, and share mockups of your website or application.
7
References
1. http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/3.2.x/spring-framework-reference/html/mvc.html
2. http://docs.spring.io/autorepo/docs/spring-security/3.0.x/reference/technical-overview.ht
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
ml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Ontology_Language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL
http://argouml.tigris.org/
http://www.graphviz.org/
https://netbeans.org/features/index.html
https://gomockingbird.com/
9. http://www.ee.ktu.lt/journal/2012/04/19__ISSN_1392-1215_A%20Methodology%20for
%20Engineering%20OWL%202%20Ontologies%20in%20Practise%20Considering
%20their%20Semantic%20Normalisation%20and%20Completeness.pdf
11