Context for maritime situation awareness

Abstract

Effective maritime situation awareness (MSA) relies on high-level information fusion tasks that benefit from a formal approach to context-based reasoning. This chapter discusses the relative notion of context through the problem of Maritime Situation Awareness. It discusses the MSA problem, exemplifying the three embedded problem-solving and associated contexts of route extraction, maritime anomaly detection, and threat assessment. The chapter highlights the impact and use of context from an information fusion perspective on the MSA problem and argues that context is a relatively defined notion compared to problem-solving situation. Problem solving involves the processing of information provided by hard sources and soft sources, provided by human-generated information such as witnesses, social media, and intelligence reports. The chapter reviews the MSA problems and presents a scheme with embedded problems constrained by different contexts.