Position Paper: Using Ontology-based Rules for Situation Awareness and Information Fusion

Versatile Information Systems, Inc. (VIS) has been applying Semantic Web technologies to the problems of situation awareness and information fusion for more than five years. Situation awareness involves the real-time processing of event-based information coming from an evolving situation in an attempt to understand what is happening. In our view, situation awareness primarily comes down to identifying higher-order relations that come into being within a situation and that have particular relevance to the problem at hand as defined by the user’s goals or objectives,. By higher-order relations we mean relations involving multiple objects; OWL ObjectProperties represent the simplest of such relations involving two objects but situation awareness is often interested in more complex relations involving several objects. We contrast these higher-order relations with those that merely define characteristics of an individual object; DataProperties fall into this category. The analytical processes that go into establishing situation awareness necessarily involve information fusion, the processes by which data/information from multiple sources are combined to produce new enhanced information that incorporates aspects of the raw, original sources.