Open Asset Ontology and the Semantic Metaverse

In the near future, the digital assets you have acquired will work in a plug-and-play manner in the Metaverse. For example, if you teleport to a pets-themed game, the game will automatically import your virtual pets and pets-related NFTs from your crypto wallet and use those assets for game play.

For that process to be fully automated without a hitch, digital assets must be tagged semantically. For example, an asset or NFT needs to be tagged as a “pet”, a “dog” or another kind of pet before the pets-themed game can recognize the asset type and use it in the game. In other words, there needs to be a common vocabulary for tagging what a digital asset represents, and that vocabulary needs to be shared by world developers and digital asset creators.

Open Asset Ontology is MHTTP’s community effort, at a very early stage, to formulate a common vocabulary to describe and categorize digital assets for the Metaverse. Inspired by earlier efforts to semantically tag the web such as the Semantic Web and Schema.org, our goal is to create a Semantic Metaverse where the naming and tagging of digital assets have shared meaning.

Like the rest of MHTTP, Open Asset Ontology will be completely open and community-driven. We have various open questions we would love to ask you and co-create with you on, such as:

• What are some of the top digital assets you want to see represented by the ontology (e.g. car, pet, sword etc.)?
• Would you like NLP-based / WordNet-similar / semantically-similar resolution for the tags, or exact matching? What is better for the community long-term?
• Do we want custom namespaces or should everything be in one namespace? If custom namespaces are available, how does that trade-off with ease of use and universal portability?
• Creation tools: how do we incorporate asset tagging into the asset creation process?

Open Asset Ontology is truly in its infancy. We would love to learn from you how we can co-create this ontology together.