Project Summary

The SAIL Project is exploring and implementing new and existing formal methods to support situation awareness that may be applied in any domain where good awareness of objects and events occurring in time and space is needed.

The Project initially ran as a one year pilot conducted jointly with the DSTO from July 2007 though June 2008. In this phase, the SAIL Team successfully implemented a declarative approach that utilized Description Logic, First Order Logic, and Controlled Natural Language and was powered by automated reasoners.

In Phase Two, NICTA is planning to apply the SAIL Technology in non-military domains, and to extend the approach to accommodate uncertainty and probabilistic reasoning.

Project outcomes include core research, system design and architecture, and a working prototype of a situation awareness system which illustrates the methods in action over a test scenario.

Achievements

In the Pilot Phase, the SAIL Project successfully:

Used formal techniques for inputting, representing, reasoning, fusing and querying information obtained from diverse information sources.
Designed and implemented a novel architecture that uses automated reasoners to build a situation representation
Used Controlled Natural Language for interacting with users to input data, do question and answer, and generate alerts.
Evaluated these techniques using a case study from the military domain provided by the DSTO.
Designed and built a prototype SAIL system to demonstrate the use of these techniques.

The developed techniques are general enough to be applied in many other application domains where good situation awareness is required.

As far as we know, no other system has successfully implemented automated reasoners to build a Situation Awareness system in this way. It requires a great deal of expertise in formal logics and the use of automated reasoners to successfully build such a system.

Benefits

The SAIL approach is novel and offers significant benefits in functionality compared to current state-of-the-art Situation Awareness Systems. Being modular and reusable, the SAIL platform reduces the development time for decision-support systems while substantially enhancing their ability to manage complex information from multiple data sources.

History

Pilot Phase

The SAIL Project started as a one year pilot run in collaboration with the Australian Department of Defence's Defence Science and Technology Organization (DSTO), commencing in July 2007 and concluding at the end of June 2008.

The pilot phase generated a prototype SAIL platform and system that uses a scenario from the military domain provided by the DSTO. It successfully implemented a novel architecture that uses a declarative approach and includes Description Logic and First Order Logic automated reasoners.

Future

Phase Two

Following the conclusion of the Pilot Phase, NICTA is seeking for applications of SAIL technology in areas like Air Traffic Control support, Smart Cars, Smart Traffic and Roads and Smart Applications for Emergencies.