A Survey of Upper Ontologies for Situation Awareness

Situation awareness enables an intelligent agent to determine the meaning of perceived information in highly dynamic environments and to share the thereby discovered knowledge. Recently, ontology-based approaches to situation awareness have been proposed; some of them facilitate upper ontologies in order to provide a common vocabulary for collaborating agents and information sources. This paper proposes an evaluation framework for such upper ontologies to elaborate missing features and to develop a better understanding of the diverse concepts involved. To demonstrate the applicability of the evaluation framework, four upper ontologies providing concepts for situation awareness are compared. The findings from this comparison indicate common as well as mutual weaknesses of the examined approaches.