SEM2 suite — Towards a tool suite for supporting knowledge management in situation awareness systems

Human operators in today´s control centers, such as air or road traffic control, need to monitor a plethora of information obtained from diverse sources. To support them in detecting critical situations within this information flood and taking timely actions, operators thus need adequate information fusion and decision support systems. Research efforts on such dedicated Situation Awareness (SAW) systems have concentrated on assisting the operator in managing the current situations. However, little focus has been so far on integratively supporting the different phases of knowledge management in SAW systems, which encompasses the acquisition, representation, validation, maintenance and reuse of knowledge gathered for and during the use of these systems, such as configuring and maintaining suitable situation templates and exploiting already assessed situations. If operators and domain experts are not supported in these tasks, however, this may discourage them from a successful adoption of such systems in real-world control center applications, as user studies revealed. Based on these, and the lessons learned from the application of our SAW system implementations BeAware! and CSI to the domain of road traffic control, we therefore propose a first step towards a tool suite fostering knowledge management in SAW systems, which stretches from the configuration phase of the system to its runtime maintenance in the light of evolving environments and user needs.