SAWA: An assistant for higher-level fusion and situation awareness

Situation awareness involves the identification and monitoring of relationships among level-one objects. This problem in general is intractable (i.e., there is a potentially infinite number of relations that could be tracked) and thus requires additional constraints and guidance defined by the user if there is to be any hope of creating practical situation awareness systems. This paper describes a Situation Awareness Assistant (SAWA) that facilitates the development of user-defined domain knowledge in the form of formal ontologies and rule sets and then permits the application of the domain knowledge to the monitoring of relevant relations as they occur in evolving situations. SAWA includes tools for developing ontologies in OWL and rules in SWRL and provides runtime components for collecting event data, storing and querying the data, monitoring relevant relations and viewing the results through a graphical user interface. An application of SAWA to a scenario from the domain of supply logistics is also presented.