Ontology For Europe's Space Situational Awareness Program

This paper presents an ontology architecture concept for the European Space Agency‘s (ESA) Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Program. It incorporates the author‘s domain ontology, The Space Situational Awareness Ontology and related ontology work. I summarize computational ontology, discuss the segments of ESA SSA, and introduce an option for a modular ontology framework reflecting the divisionsof the SSA program. Among other things, ontologies are used for data sharing and integration. By applying ontology to ESA data, the ESA may better achieve its integration and innovation goals, while simultaneously improving the state of peaceful SSA

Toward a unified PNT, Part 1: Complexity and context: Key challenges of multisensor positioning

The next generation of navigation and positioning systems must provide greater accuracy and reliability in a range of challenging environments to meet the needs of a variety of mission-critical applications. No single navigation technology is robust enough to meet these requirements on its own, so a multisensor solution is required. Known environmental features, such as signs, buildings, terrain height variation, and magnetic anomalies, may or may not be available for positioning. The system could be stationary, carried by a pedestrian, or on any type of land, sea, or air vehicle. Furthermore, for many applications, the environment and host behavior are subject to change. A multi-sensor solution is thus required. The expert knowledge problem is compounded by the fact that different modules in an integrated navigation system are often supplied by different organizations, who may be reluctant to share necessary design information if this is considered to be intellectual property that must be protected

Hierarchical video surveillance architecture: a chassis for video big data analytics and exploration

There is increasing reliance on video surveillance systems for systematic derivation, analysis and interpretation of the data needed for predicting, planning, evaluating and implementing public safety. This is evident from the massive number of surveillance cameras deployed across public locations. For example, in July 2013, the British Security Industry Association (BSIA) reported that over 4 million CCTV cameras had been installed in Britain alone. The BSIA also reveal that only 1.5% of these are state owned. In this paper, we propose a framework that allows access to data from privately owned cameras, with the aim of increasing the efficiency and accuracy of public safety planning, security activities, and decision support systems that are based on video integrated surveillance systems. The accuracy of results obtained from government-owned public safety infrastructure would improve greatly if privately owned surveillance systems ‘expose’ relevant video-generated metadata events, such as triggered alerts and also permit query of a metadata repository. Subsequently, a police officer, for example, with an appropriate level of system permission can query unified video systems across a large geographical area such as a city or a country to predict the location of an interesting entity, such as a pedestrian or a vehicle. This becomes possible with our proposed novel hierarchical architecture, the Fused Video Surveillance Architecture (FVSA). At the high level, FVSA comprises of a hardware framework that is supported by a multi-layer abstraction software interface. It presents video surveillance systems as an adapted computational grid of intelligent services, which is integration-enabled to communicate with other compatible systems in the Internet of Things (IoT)

A modular software architecture for UAVs

There have been several attempts to create scalable and hardware independent software architectures for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). In this work, we propose an onboard architecture for UAVs where hardware abstraction, data storage and communication between modules are efficiently maintained. All processing and software development is done on the UAV while state and mission status of the UAV is monitored from a ground station. The architecture also allows rapid development of mission-specific third party applications on the vehicle with the help of the core module

Engine performance characteristics and evaluation of variation in the length of intake plenum

In the engine with multipoint fuel injection system using electronically controlled fuel injectors has an intake manifold in which only the air flows and, the fuel is injected into the intake valve. Since the intake manifolds transport mainly air, the supercharging effects of the variable length intake plenum will be different from carbureted engine. Engine tests have been carried out with the aim of constituting a base study to design a new variable length intake manifold plenum. The objective in this research is to study the engine performance characteristics and to evaluate the effects of the variation in the length of intake plenum. The engine test bed used for experimental work consists of a control panel, a hydraulic dynamometer and measurement instruments to measure the parameters of engine performance characteristics. The control panel is being used to perform administrative and management operating system. Besides that, the hydraulic dynamometer was used to measure the power of an engine by using a cell filled with liquid to increase its load. Thus, measurement instrument is provided in this test to measure the as brake torque, brake power, thermal efficiency and specific fuel consumption. The results showed that the variation in the plenum length causes an improvement on the engine performance characteristics especially on the fuel consumption at high load and low engine speeds which are put forward the system using for urban roads. From this experiment, it will show the behavior of engine performance

Locational wireless and social media-based surveillance

The number of smartphones and tablets as well as the volume of traffic generated by these devices has been growing constantly over the past decade and this growth is predicted to continue at an increasing rate over the next five years. Numerous native features built into contemporary smart devices enable highly accurate digital fingerprinting techniques. Furthermore, software developers have been taking advantage of locational capabilities of these devices by building applications and social media services that enable convenient sharing of information tied to geographical locations. Mass online sharing resulted in a large volume of locational and personal data being publicly available for extraction. A number of researchers have used this opportunity to design and build tools for a variety of uses – both respectable and nefarious. Furthermore, due to the peculiarities of the IEEE 802.11 specification, wireless-enabled smart devices disclose a number of attributes, which can be observed via passive monitoring. These attributes coupled with the information that can be extracted using social media APIs present an opportunity for research into locational surveillance, device fingerprinting and device user identification techniques. This paper presents an in-progress research study and details the findings to date

MarinEye - A tool for marine monitoring

This work presents an autonomous system for marine integrated physical-chemical and biological monitoring – the MarinEye system. It comprises a set of sensors providing diverse and relevant information for oceanic environment characterization and marine biology studies. It is constituted by a physicalchemical water properties sensor suite, a water filtration and sampling system for DNA collection, a plankton imaging system and biomass assessment acoustic system. The MarinEye system has onboard computational and logging capabilities allowing it either for autonomous operation or for integration in other marine observing systems (such as Observatories or robotic vehicles. It was designed in order to collect integrated multi-trophic monitoring data. The validation in operational environment on 3 marine observatories: RAIA, BerlengasWatch and Cascais on the coast of Portugal is also discussed.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Utilising semantic technologies for decision support in dementia care

The main objective of this work is to discuss our experience in utilising semantic technologies for building decision support in Dementia care systems that are based on the non-intrusive on the non-intrusive monitoring of the patient’s behaviour. Our approach adopts context-aware modelling of the patient’s condition to facilitate the analysis of the patient’s behaviour within the inhabited environment (movement and room occupancy patterns, use of equipment, etc.) with reference to the semantic knowledge about the patient’s condition (history of present of illness, dependable behaviour patterns, etc.). The reported work especially focuses on the critical role of the semantic reasoning engine in inferring medical advice, and by means of practical experimentation and critical analysis suggests important findings related to the methodology of deploying the appropriate semantic rules systems, and the dynamics of the efficient utilisation of complex event processing technology in order to the meet the requirements of decision support for remote healthcare systems