Semantic reasoning for intelligent emergency response applications

Emergency response applications require the processing of large amounts of data, generated by a diverse set of sensors and devices, in order to provide for an accurate and concise view of the situation at hand. The adoption of semantic technologies allows for the definition of a formal domain model and intelligent data processing and reasoning on this model based on generated device and sensor measurements. This paper presents a novel approach to emergency response applications, such as fire fighting, integrating a formal semantic domain model into an event-based decision support system, which supports reasoning on this model. The developed model consists of several generic ontologies describing concepts and properties which can be applied to diverse context-aware applications. These are extended with emergency response specific ontologies. Additionally, inference on the model performed by a reasoning engine is dynamically synchronized with the rest of the architectural components. This allows to automatically trigger events based on predefined conditions. The proposed ontology and developed reasoning methodology is validated on two scenarios, i.e. (i) the construction of an emergency response incident and corresponding scenario and (ii) monitoring of the state of a fire fighter during an emergency response

A multi-INT semantic reasoning framework for intelligence analysis support

Lockheed Martin Corp. has funded research to generate a framework and methodology for developing semantic reasoning applications to support the discipline oflntelligence Analysis. This chapter outlines that framework, discusses how it may be used to advance the information sharing and integrated analytic needs of the Intelligence Community, and suggests a system I software architecture for such applications

Semantics-based selection of everyday concepts in visual lifelogging

Concept-based indexing, based on identifying various semantic concepts appearing in multimedia, is an attractive option for multimedia retrieval and much research tries to bridge the semantic gap between the media’s low-level features and high-level semantics. Research into concept-based multimedia retrieval has generally focused on detecting concepts from high quality media such as broadcast TV or movies, but it is not well addressed in other domains like lifelogging where the original data is captured with poorer quality. We argue that in noisy domains such as lifelogging, the management of data needs to include semantic reasoning in order to deduce a set of concepts to represent lifelog content for applications like searching, browsing or summarisation. Using semantic concepts to manage lifelog data relies on the fusion of automatically-detected concepts to provide a better understanding of the lifelog data. In this paper, we investigate the selection of semantic concepts for lifelogging which includes reasoning on semantic networks using a density-based approach. In a series of experiments we compare different semantic reasoning approaches and the experimental evaluations we report on lifelog data show the efficacy of our approach

Explaining Semantic Reasoning Using Argumentation

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are popular because they provide a paradigm that naturally meets the current demand to design and implement distributed intelligent systems. When developing a multi-agent application, it is common to use ontologies to provide the domain-specific knowledge and vocabulary necessary for agents to achieve the system goals. In this paper, we propose an approach in which agents can query semantic reasoners and use the received inferences to build explanations for such reasoning. Also, thanks to an internal representation of inference rules used to build explanations, in the form of argumentation schemes, agents are able to reason and make decisions based on the answers from the semantic reasoner. Furthermore, agents can communicate the built explanation to other agents and humans, using computational or natural language representations of arguments. Our approach paves the way towards multi-agent systems able to provide explanations from the reasoning carried out by semantic reasoners

Semantic reasoning on the edge of internet of things

Abstract. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a paradigm where physical objects are connected with each other with identifying, sensing, networking and processing capabilities over the Internet. Millions of new devices will be added into IoT network thus generating huge amount of data. How to represent, store, interconnect, search, and organize information generated by IoT devices become a challenge. Semantic technologies could play an important role by encoding meaning into data to enable a computer system to possess knowledge and reasoning. The vast amount of devices and data are also challenges. Edge Computing reduces both network latency and resource consumptions by deploying services and distributing computing tasks from the core network to the edge. We recognize four challenges from IoT systems. First the centralized server may generate long latency because of physical distances. Second concern is that the resource-constrained IoT devices have limited computing ability in processing heavy tasks. Third, the data generated by heterogeneous devices can hardly be understood and utilized by other devices or systems. Our research focuses on these challenges and provide a solution based on Edge computing and semantic technologies. We utilize Edge computing and semantic reasoning into IoT. Edge computing distributes tasks to the reasoning devices, which we call the Edge nodes. They are close to the terminal devices and provide services. The newly added resources could balance the workload of the systems and improve the computing capability. We annotate meaning into the data with Resource Description Framework thus providing an approach for heterogeneous machines to understand and utilize the data. We use semantic reasoning as a general purpose intelligent processing method. The thesis work focuses on studying semantic reasoning performance in IoT system with Edge computing paradigm. We develop an Edge based IoT system with semantic technologies. The system deploys semantic reasoning services on Edge nodes. Based on IoT system, we design five experiments to evaluate the performance of the integrated IoT system. We demonstrate how could the Edge computing paradigm facilitate IoT in terms of data transforming, semantic reasoning and service experience. We analyze how to improve the performance by properly distributing the task for Cloud and Edge nodes. The thesis work result shows that the Edge computing could improve the performance of the semantic reasoning in IoT

Estimating Fire Weather Indices via Semantic Reasoning over Wireless Sensor Network Data Streams

Wildfires are frequent, devastating events in Australia that regularly cause significant loss of life and widespread property damage. Fire weather indices are a widely-adopted method for measuring fire danger and they play a significant role in issuing bushfire warnings and in anticipating demand for bushfire management resources. Existing systems that calculate fire weather indices are limited due to low spatial and temporal resolution. Localized wireless sensor networks, on the other hand, gather continuous sensor data measuring variables such as air temperature, relative humidity, rainfall and wind speed at high resolutions. However, using wireless sensor networks to estimate fire weather indices is a challenge due to data quality issues, lack of standard data formats and lack of agreement on thresholds and methods for calculating fire weather indices. Within the scope of this paper, we propose a standardized approach to calculating Fire Weather Indices (a.k.a. fire danger ratings) and overcome a number of the challenges by applying Semantic Web Technologies to the processing of data streams from a wireless sensor network deployed in the Springbrook region of South East Queensland. This paper describes the underlying ontologies, the semantic reasoning and the Semantic Fire Weather Index (SFWI) system that we have developed to enable domain experts to specify and adapt rules for calculating Fire Weather Indices. We also describe the Web-based mapping interface that we have developed, that enables users to improve their understanding of how fire weather indices vary over time within a particular region.Finally, we discuss our evaluation results that indicate that the proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in terms of accuracy, precision and query performance.Comment: 20pages, 12 figure

Towards dynamic context discovery and composition

Context-awareness has been identified as a key characteristic for pervasive computing systems. As a variety of context-aware environments begin to flourish, pervasive applications shall have to interact different environments well. In this paper we propose extensions to the Strathclyde Context Infrastructure that gives context-aware applications the potential to adapt to unfamiliar environments transparently. We present a vision of a context discovery technique based on automated semantic reasoning about context information and services. The technique will offer higher levels of scalability and of interoperability with new context environments that cannot be achieved with current methods