Battle Management Language as a “Lingua Franca” for situation awareness

Information for situation awareness and management comes from a variety of sources, both device-generated (e.g., sensors) and human-generated. The latter includes databases, ontologies, intelligence reports, open source such as newspaper or television, and, increasingly informal communications such as Twitter or Facebook. Problematic is the fact that all of this information is created or stored in different formats, requiring processing and synthesis by humans. Furthermore, in international settings such as coalition operations, information may be in more than one natural language. Each of these factors makes automatic processing of information difficult, adding complexity and reducing timeliness. Battle Management Language offers a vehicle for automatic processing of information from diverse sources through a standardized representation, which preserves semantic information, while supporting information fusion and situation management.