Computed Ontology-based Situation Awareness of Multi-User Observations

In recent years, we have developed a framework of human-computer interaction that offers recognition of various communication modalities including speech, lip movement, facial expression, handwriting/drawing, gesture, text and visual symbols. The framework allows the rapid construction of a multimodal, multi-device, and multi-user communication system within crisis management. This paper reports the approaches used in multi-user information integration (input fusion) and multimodal presentation (output fission) modules, which can be used in isolation, but also as part of the framework. The latter is able to specify and produce contextsensitive and user-tailored output combining language, speech, visual-language and graphics. These modules provide a communication channel between the system and users with different communication devices. By the employment of ontology, the system’s view about the world is constructed from multi-user observations and appropriate multimodal responses are generated.