An Event Based Approach To Situational Representation

TL;DR

This paper advocates for an event-based approach to representing complex, evolving situations in domains like crisis response, emphasizing events as key abstractions for situational awareness and discussing associated challenges and solutions.

Contribution

It introduces an event-based framework for situational representation and discusses the design challenges and potential technological directions for an effective Event Management System.

Findings

Events serve as a unifying abstraction for situational awareness.

Traditional data systems are limited for event management.

Proposes directions for developing specialized Event Management Systems.

Abstract

Many application domains require representing interrelated real-world activities and/or evolving physical phenomena. In the crisis response domain, for instance, one may be interested in representing the state of the unfolding crisis (e.g., forest fire), the progress of the response activities such as evacuation and traffic control, and the state of the crisis site(s). Such a situation representation can then be used to support a multitude of applications including situation monitoring, analysis, and planning. In this paper, we make a case for an event based representation of situations where events are defined to be domain-specific significant occurrences in space and time. We argue that events offer a unifying and powerful abstraction to building situational awareness applications. We identify challenges in building an Event Management System (EMS) for which traditional data and knowledge management systems prove to be limited and suggest possible directions and technologies to address the challenges.