Situation Awareness by Inference and Logic
 

Sail Project                    Sail Technology                    Sail Team 

 
Situation awareness is concerned with perceiving elements of an environment in time and space, comprehending their meaning and projecting their status in the near future.  Good situation awareness is very important for managing dynamic real-time situations like military scenarios, natural or man-made emergencies and transport situations like air traffic control.

NICTA's SAIL (Situation Awareness by Inference and Logic) Project helps decision makers have better situation awareness by providing a system that uses formal logic to answer questions about the objects and events of a situation, and issue alerts when it recognizes factors of interest emerging in the situation. 

The SAIL Technology uses a novel approach that includes formal logics and ontologies to represent the situation, and automated reasoning to infer logical consequences.  The logical machinery acts on input data from sensors and other sources to build an overall representation of the situation in logical form.  This representation is constructed in real-time, and can be interrogated for question answering and alert generation via the use of controlled natural language that translates English to and from the logical form used by the system.

The approach is very modular and may be applied in any domain where situation awareness is needed.