Semantic information integration with transformations for stream reasoning

The automatic, on-demand, integration of information from multiple diverse sources outside the control of the application itself is central to many fusion applications. An important problem is to handle situations when the requested information is not directly available but has to be generated or adapted through transformations. This paper extends the semantic information integration approach used in the stream-based knowledge processing middleware DyKnow with support for finding and automatically applying transformations. Two types of transformations are considered. Automatic transformation between different units of measurements and between streams of different types. DyKnow achieves semantic integration by creating a common ontology, specifying the semantic content of streams relative to the ontology and using semantic matching to find relevant streams. By using semantic mappings between ontologies it is also possible to do semantic matching over multiple ontologies. The complete stream reasoning approach is integrated in the Robot Operating System (ROS) and used in collaborative unmanned aircraft systems missions.