Situation Awareness: Issues and Challenges

To explain what I mean by " situation awareness " I often use the example of watching the games like Ameri-can football or baseball. Since I have never learned the rules and the strategies of these games, when watching them on TV, although I can clearly see where each player is and where the ball is, I still have no idea of what is going on. Clearly, in this case I cannot claim that I am aware of the situation. The term " situation awareness " has been often interpreted in a somewhat simplistic way as merely the knowledge of all the objects in a specific area, and possibly their kinematic states. It is clear, however, that the meaning of this term implies more than that. For instance, in [1], awareness is explained as " AWARE implies vigilance in observing or alertness in drawing inferences from what one experiences. " In other words, a subject is aware if the subject not only observes (experiences) the objects but also is capable of drawing conclusions from these observations. The next question is about the meaning of being aware of a specific situation. The word " situation " is defined in [1] as: " 1 a : the way in which something is placed in relation to its surroundings. " So the essence of situation awareness is the knowledge of all the objects that are relevant to the subject and the knowledge of the relations that the subject is in with respect to these objects. In other words, awareness means knowing not only objects but also relations. The notions of " awareness " and " situation " are not totally independent in the sense that they both have one common aspect, the aspect of " relation ". In mathematics , a relation is a subset of the Cartesian product of a number of sets. For instance, the Cartesian product A × B of two sets A and B is the set of all ordered pairs < a, b >, i.e., A × B = {< a, b >, a ∈ A, b ∈ B}. A relation R is then a subset of the Cartesian product, R ⊂ A × B. In logic, relations are treated as interpretations of predicates. While a predicate is a syntactic concept, a relation is a semantic counterpart of the predicate. Awareness requires the capability of drawing conclusions , …