Uncertainty reasoning for service-based situational awareness information on the Semantic Web

Accurate situational assessment is key to any decision making especially crucial in military command and control, air traffic control, and complex system decision making. Endsley describes three dependent levels of situational awareness, (1) perception, (2) understanding, and (3) projection. This research is focused on Endsley's second-level situational awareness (understanding) as it applies to service-oriented information technology environments in the context of the Semantic Web. Specifically, this research addresses the problem of developing accurate situational assessments related to the status or health of IT services especially composite, dynamic IT services, when some of Endsley's first level (perceived) information is inaccurate or incomplete. This research plans to use Costa's probabilistic Web ontology language (PR-OWL) framework to build an ontology that supports reasoning with service-oriented information in the context of the Semantic Web and then assess the effectiveness of the developed ontology.