Ontology-based situation awareness

The notions of “situation” and “situation awareness” have been formulated by many authors in various contexts. In this paper, we present a formalization of situations that is compatible with the interpretation of situation awareness in terms of human awareness as well as the situation theory of Barwise and Devlin. The purpose of this paper is to capture the situation theory of Barwise in terms of an OWL ontology. This allows one to express situations in a commonly supported language with computer processable semantics. The paper provides a description of the classes and the properties in the ontology, and illustrates the formalization with some simple examples.