Knowledge representation requirements for situation awareness

Full spectrum dominance (FSD), as defined by Joint Vision 2020, is the ability to be persuasive in peace, decisive in war and preeminent in any form of conflict. FSD cannot be accomplished without the capability to know what the adversary is currently doing as well as the capacity to correctly anticipate the adversary´s future actions. This ability has been referred to as situation awareness (SA). An effective SA capability must seamlessly combine data driven bottom up approaches with top down goal directed approaches. A requirement that cuts across many of the functions required to provide SA is knowledge representation. In this paper, we provide an overview of SA, describe a framework that can assist in building SA systems, and provide a discussion on current issues with database and knowledge representation.