Linking in-game events and entities to social data on the Web

The Web of Data is an emerging term used to describe a recent trend for publishing and interlinking previously disconnected datasets on the Web in order to make them more valuable and useful as a whole. In the world of gaming, a parallel issue exists in that there are many different types of games, player profiles and web-based discussion systems for gamers that remain disconnected from each other due to a lack of standardised methods for expressing gaming entities and events. In this paper, we describe an approach to link entities in-game and gamer profiles to items on the Web, and vice versa, that exploits Semantic Web technologies. Previous work focused on client-side capturing of gamer information for online profiles, and in the reverse direction, creating game content from open data on the Web. Other work has tackled how community requirements can assist in altering games and providing updated content for gamers. Our work proposes a more generally-applicable solution that would provide for a set of terms commonly found in games to be used on the Web, and to list suitable Web information sources (e.g. Wikia games wikis) that could be used to enhance in-game play. This work will extends previous efforts to create games ontologies, resulting in a more structured RDF games ontology describing game types, features, events and character profiles. We describe how our ontology could be linked to existing Semantic Web vocabularies for describing social data on the Web, including Friend of a Friend (FOAF) and Semantically Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC).