AKTiveSA: A Technical Demonstrator System for Enhanced Situation Awareness

The issue of improved situation awareness is a key concern for military agencies, promising to deliver strategic advantages in a variety of conflict and non-conflict scenarios. Improved situation awareness can benefit operational effectiveness by facilitating the planning process, improving the quality and timeliness of decisions, and providing better feedback regarding the strategic consequences of military actions. In this paper, we aim to show how a combination of semantic technologies and user interface design initiatives can be used to improve situation awareness in a simulated humanitarian relief scenario. We describe the development of a technical demonstrator system, the AKTiveSA TDS, which integrates a variety of knowledge technologies and visualization components within the context of a unitary application framework. We also describe our approach to scenario development, knowledge acquisition, ontology engineering, and system design. Some specific problems encountered during system development are discussed, e.g. the performance overheads associated with rules-based processing, and potential solution strategies for these problems are presented alongside a description of future development activities