A Formal Framework for Situation Awareness

This project will develop a formal framework for Situation Awareness (SAW). A rigorous mathematical formalization of the SAW problem will be developed. An infrastructure for Situation Analysis compatible with the formalization will be proposed. Theinfrastructure will be organized around an ontology for the domain of Situation Awareness. The functionality of the infrastructure will include: collection of information from various sources, like JDL's Level 1 sources, intelligence channels, humans;representation of the information in a formal language; reasoning about and update of the relations among the objects in the SAW domain; Level 2 fusion of the various kinds of information and derivation of the uncertainty and the ambiguity of decisions;ability to reason about current and future threats and impacts of particular decisions. An ontology for the SAWdomain and SAW scenarios will be developed and used for evaluation of the proposed approach. The results of this project are expected to be useful in both military and commercial domains. Military Situation Awareness systems can be built based upon theapproach investigated in this project. Systems to support situation awareness in the commercial world may include fraud detection, enterprise knowledge management and detection of unexpected or unusual behaviors.