18th ICCRTS Increasing Maritime Situational Awareness with Interoperating Distributed Information Sources

Enhanced maritime situational awareness picture is a common need for maritime authorities interested in security, safety, border control, and marine environment protection. In order to have an enhanced maritime situation awareness picture, it is recognized that there is a need for advanced and innovative surveillance and information-sharing technologies. This study presents an open and interoperable maritime surveillance framework which utilize ontology based operations and domain rules in order to integrate different data stemming from a combination of systems and sensors; and perform behavior analysis of the detected cooperative and non-cooperative targets of any size. In this system, seamless information exchange among systems and sensors leads to better and cost effective maritime surveillance, while performing behavioral analysis enables intelligent decision making and reduces time-to-act. Within the scope of this study, a Maritime Situational Awareness Ontology is created as a common model to mediate different information sources, and a rule repository is formed for storing suspicious vessels criteria. The presented work is undertaken within the scope of RECONSURVE (Reconfigurable Surveillance System with Communicating Smart Sensors) project supported by EUREKA ITEA2 cluster.