Abstracting and reasoning over ship trajectories and web data 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 this gap by representing knowledge about the data at different level of abstraction. In this paper we present the Simple Event Model (SEM) and its application in a Maritime Safety and Security use case about Situational Awareness, where the data also come as low-level features (of ship trajectories). We show how we abstract over these low-level features, recognize simple behavior events using a Piecewise Linear Segmentation algorithm, and model the resulting events as instances of SEM. We aggregate web data from different sources, 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 comes from the Dutch Poseidon project.