Towards ontology-based realtime behaviour interpretation

The authors describe a generic framework for model-based behaviour interpretation and its application to monitoring aircraft service activities. Behaviour models are represented in a standardised conceptual knowledge base using OWL-DL for concept definitions and the extension SWRL for constraints. The conceptual knowledge base is automatically converted into an operational scene interpretation system implemented in Java and JESS that accepts tracked objects as input and delivers high-level activity descriptions as output. The interpretation process employs Beam Search for exploring the interpretation space, guided by a probabilistic rating system. The probabilistic model cannot be efficiently represented in the ontology, but it has been designed to closely correspond to the compositional hierarchy of behaviour concepts. Experiments are described that demonstrate the system performance with real airport data.