Werner Retschitzegger

Situation awareness, which aims at determining the meaning of information about perceived objects, is the basis for making decisions in heterogeneous, highly dynamic environments. Recently, ontology-based approaches to situation awareness have been proposed. However, these approaches partly reinvent the wheel, since a common approach to ontology-based situation awareness is missing. Our work focuses on the integral task of such an approach, namely the derivation of relevant relations among the objects of interest. In this paper, we introduce the notion of primitive relations which are inherent in achieving situation awareness. We argue that explicitly deriving these primitive relations could be the foundation of a framework for ontology-based situation awareness which is supposed to reduce the efforts involved in developing situation-aware systems in arbitrary application domains.