Beaware!—situation awareness, the ontology-driven way.

Abstract Information overload is a severe problem for human operators of large-scale control systems as, for example, encountered in the domain of road traffic management. Operators of such systems are at risk to lack situation awareness, because existing systems focus on the mere presentation of the available information on graphical user interfaces-thus endangering the timely and correct identification, resolution, and prevention of critical situations. In recent years, ontologybased approaches to situation awareness featuring a semantically richer knowledge model have emerged. However, current approaches are either highly domain-specific or have, in case they are domain-independent, shortcomings regarding their reusability. In this paper, we present our experience gained from the development of BeAware!, a framework for ontology-driven information systems aiming at increasing an operator's situation awareness. In contrast to existing domain-independent approaches, BeAware!'s ontology introduces the concept of spatio-temporal primitive relations between observed real-world objects thereby improving the reusability of the framework. To show its applicability, a prototype of BeAware! has been implemented in the domain of road traffic management. An overview of this prototype and lessons learned for the development of ontology-driven information systems complete our contribution

On relating heterogeneous elements from different ontologies

In the extensive usage of ontologies envisaged by the Semantic Web there is a compelling need for expressing mappings between different elements of heterogeneous ontologies. State of the art languages for ontology mapping enable to express semantic relations between homogeneous components of different ontologies; namely, they allow to map concepts into concepts, individuals into individuals, and properties into properties. In many real world cases this is not enough; for example when relations in an ontology correspond to a class in another ontology (i.e. reification of relations). To support this kind of interoperability we need therefore richer mapping languages, offering constructs for the representation of heterogeneous mappings. In this paper, we propose an extension of Distributed Description Logics (DDL) with mappings between concepts and relations. We provide a semantics of the proposed extension and sound and complete characterisation of the effects of these mappings in terms of the new ontological knowledge they entail