Formal representation of events in a surveillance domain ontology

Following the exponential deployment of surveillance systems across a wide-spread region of geographic locations, detection and representation of events has become a critical element in automated surveillance systems. In this paper, we present an extensive ontology framework for representing complex semantic events. The proposed ontology builds on DOLCE ontology and relies on the linguistic and cognitive modelling of philosophical knowledge to achieve interoperability between proprietary surveillance systems. The explicit definition of event vocabulary presented in the paper is aimed at aiding forensic analysts to objectively identify and represent complex events. The expressiveness of the proposed ontology framework is described in the context of London Riots which took place in 2011.