BeAware!—Situation awareness, the ontology-driven way

Information overload is a severe problem for human operators of large-scale control systems as, for example, encountered in the domain of road traffic management. Operators of such systems are at risk to lack situation awareness, because existing systems focus on the mere presentation of the available information on graphical user interfaces—thus endangering the timely and correct identification, resolution, and prevention of critical situations. In recent years, ontology-based approaches to situation awareness featuring a semantically richer knowledge model have emerged. However, current approaches are either highly domain-specific or have, in case they are domain-independent, shortcomings regarding their reusability.In this paper, we present our experience gained from the development of BeAware!, a framework for ontology-driven information systems aiming at increasing an operator's situation awareness. In contrast to existing domain-independent approaches, BeAware!'s ontology introduces the concept of spatio-temporal primitive relations between observed real-world objects thereby improving the reusability of the framework. To show its applicability, a prototype of BeAware! has been implemented in the domain of road traffic management. An overview of this prototype and lessons learned for the development of ontology-driven information systems complete our contribution.