Abstract

The Department of Information Science is one of seven departments that make up the School of Business at the University of Otago. The department offers courses of study leading to a major in Information Science within the BCom, BA and BSc degrees. In addition to undergraduate teaching, the department is also strongly involved in postgraduate research programmes leading to MCom, MA, MSc and PhD degrees. Research projects in spatial information processing, connectionist-based information systems, software engineering and software development, information engineering and database, software metrics, distributed information systems, multimedia information systems and information systems security are particularly well supported. The views expressed in this paper are not necessarily those of the department as a whole. The accuracy of the information presented in this paper is the sole responsibility of the authors. Copyright Copyright remains with the authors. Permission to copy for research or teaching purposes is granted on the condition that the authors and the Series are given due acknowledgment. Reproduction in any form for purposes other than research or teaching is forbidden unless prior written permission has been obtained from the authors. Correspondence This paper represents work to date and may not necessarily form the basis for the authors' final conclusions relating to this topic. It is likely, however, that the paper will appear in some form in a journal or in conference proceedings in the near future. The authors would be pleased to receive correspondence in connection with any of the issues raised in this paper, or for subsequent publication details. Please write directly to the authors at the address provided below. (Details of final journal/conference publication venues for these papers are also provided on the Department's publications web pages: http://www.otago.ac.nz/informationscience/pubs/). Any other correspondence concerning the Series should be sent to the DPS Coordinator. Abstract. Second Life is a multi-purpose online virtual world that provides a rich platform for remote human interaction. It is increasingly being used as a simulation platform to model complex human interactions in diverse areas, as well as to simulate multi-agent systems. It would therefore be beneficial to provide techniques allowing high-level agent development tools, especially cognitive agent platforms such as belief-desire-intention (BDI) programming frameworks, to be interfaced to Second Life. This is not a trivial task as it involves mapping potentially unreliable sensor readings from complex Second Life simulations to a domain-specific abstract logical model of observed properties and/or events. This paper investigates this problem in the context of agent interactions in a multi-agent system simulated in Second Life. We present a framework which facilitates the connection of any multi-agent platform with Second Life, and demonstrate it in conjunction with an extension of the Jason BDI interpreter. Department of Information Science