Semantic Technologies and Enhanced Situation Awareness

Situation awareness is a critical element of military decision superiority in a wide variety of operational contexts. Improved situation awareness can benefit operational effectiveness by facilitating the planning process, improving the quality and timeliness of decisions, and providing better feedback about the strategic and tactical consequences of military actions. The military coalition environment presents a number of challenges to situation awareness research; not only in terms of the technical approaches used to enhance situation awareness, but also in terms of the models and conceptual frameworks used to analyse situation awareness. This paper outlines an approach to enhancing situation awareness that is grounded in the use of Semantic Web technologies. We describe the challenges to both individual and team situation awareness presented by coalition military environments, and we discuss ways in which semantic technologies might be used to address these challenges. We suggest that an approach featuring domain ontologies, reasoning capabilities, semantic queries and semantic integration techniques provides the basis for an integrated framework for improving situation awareness in military coalition contexts. We provide an example of our approach in the form of the InfoGlue framework for adaptive, context-aware information retrieval