Military Communications and Information Technology: A Trusted ...

Chapter 3: Information Technology for Interoperability and Decision...
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sors. It allows reporting of accidents and other events directly from users located
outside the monitoring area.
The idea of ENS was to apply the IEO for automatic classification of events
and threats. On the basis of the A-Box ontology model and description of the event
delivered by the reporting module, the server module is able to automatically
classify the event to a certain type and generate notification for necessary public
safety services. ENS is also useful as a source of dynamic data that, further on,
can be presented on the road map as potential traffic difficulties or obstacles (e.g.
information about the accidents) and used to compute routes taking into account
threats and dangers and alerting of INSIGMA users.
Application of the IEO in the ENS is well suited to the system exploitation
phase when ontology is used to provide reasoning and automation of the processes.
It is very important to get rid of “the man in the loop” and support decision process
in terms of defining necessary actions in case of an accident or other dangerous
situation. On the basis of the event description the reasoning module defines threats
related to the observed situation and necessary actions to be taken by emergence
services (e.g. calling the ambulance, calling the fire brigade, etc.).
III. Event Notification Service
The ENS was implemented as a set of functional software modules in the C
ommunications&Information Infrastructure Laboratory of Military Communication
Institute. The ENS allows creation, relaying and processing of short messages
containing formatted information about events spotted by a user. The results
of processing the messages is stored in Events Repository (ER) for further use [3].
The ENS infrastructure is composed of the notification module and reporting
module (see Fig. 1). Notification module is used to collect and process messages from
users, extract appropriate information and pass it to the Reasoning Module (RM).
The output from RM is then fed into Message Dispatcher (MD) which notifies users
specified in the subscription list. The client modules provide graphical user interface
with formatted fields to fill in information about an event. The client module also
allows creating of structured messages and it handles authentication of the user.
The high level view of ENS model is presented in the Figure 1. The implementation
of ENS is based on the Session Initiation Protocol enhancements for Instant
Messaging – SIMPLE [4]. The SIMPLE messages are used as an application level
transport protocol for relaying user generated information about observed and
reported events. The information is structured according to high-level ontology
dedicated for INSIGMA system [5]. The main reason behind the use of SIMPLE were
requirements for identification, registration and authentication of users. The SIP
Uniform Resource Identifier are used as an identification whereas mechanisms
for registration and authentication are defined in the SIP RFC [6]. Localisation
of a user is an additional benefit from using SIP architecture.