Situation awareness in airport environment based on Semantic Web technologies

In the present paper the authors show how the application of Semantic Web technologies, i.e. ontology and rule languages, can be used to describe situations and enhance situation awareness providing also suggested actions to the human operator in a data fusion architecture aimed at airport security. The paper presents the ontology design, i.e. main classes and relationship, and the possible roles for situation categorization including the application of rules. In addition, an insight of alternative options including their pros and cons in terms of representation expressivity and complexity, is provided. An analysis of the architectural issues and their impacts considering available technologies and their limitations have been included in the present paper. In order to validate the proposed approach both from the representation and from the complexity point of view, a comparison with a well-established framework, i.e. Situation Ontology developed by Vistology, has been carried out in terms of language complexity and dynamic behaviour in order to assess the performance and limits of the proposed system.