Combining ship trajectories and semantics with the simple event model (SEM)

Bridging the gap between low-level features and semantics is a problem commonly acknowledged in the Multimedia community. Event modeling can fill the gap. In this paper we present the Simple Event Model (SEM) and its application in a Maritime Safety and Security use case about Situational Awareness. We show how we abstract over low-level features, recognize simple behavior events using a Piecewise Linear Segmentation algorithm, and model the events as instances of SEM. We apply deduction rules, spatial proximity reasoning, and semantic web reasoning in SWI-Prolog to derive abstract events from the recognized simple events. The use case described in this paper come from the Dutch Poseidon project.