Abstraction of informed virtual geographic environments

We propose a novel method for the automated generation of virtual geographic environments that allows using geographic information system data to build what we call informed virtual geographic environment (IVGE). The description of an IVGE integrates semantic information expressed using conceptual graphs, a standard knowledge representation technique. In addition, we propose an abstraction process that uses geometric, topologic, and semantic characteristics of geographic features to build a hierarchical graph-based structure describing this IVGE. Our IVGE model enables the support of large-scale and complex geographic environment modeling for multiagent geo-simulations in which the agents are situated and with which they interact.