Multi-layer ontology based information fusion for situation awareness

Originated from the military domain, Situation Awareness (SAW) is proposed with the aim to obtain information superiority through information fusion and thus to achieve decision superiority. It requires not only the perception of the environment, but also the reasoning of the implicit or implicated meaning under the explicit phenomenon. The principal goal of this paper is to exploit the semantic web technologies to enhance the situation awareness through autonomous information fusion and inference. Recently, ontology has played a significant role in the representation and integration of domain knowledge for high-level reasoning. The multi-level ontology merging paradigm is followed in this work for the conceptual modeling and knowledge representation. Firstly, Military Scenario Ontology (MSO) and Battle Management Ontology (BMO) are defined according to corresponding reputable standards as the domain ontology. We propose the Situation Awareness Ontology (SAO) as the core ontology to integrate MSO, BMO and even other publicly defined ontology for higher-level information fusion. The SAO is composed of objects representations, relations and events that are necessary to capture the information for further cognition, reasoning and decision-making about the situation evolving over time. Military doctrines and domain knowledge are expressed as Horn clause type rules for reasoning and inference. Multi-layered semantic information fusion that integrates ontologies, semantic web technologies and rule-based reasoning can therefore be conducted. An experimental scenario is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of this architecture.