Integration of ontologies and Bayesian networks for maritime situation awareness

This paper describes the main lines of the Intelligent Maritime Awareness Situation System (IMASS) developed to support an Electronic Surveillance platform conceived to contrast pirates activities in the Aden Gulf. The proposal is based on a solution that integrates an ontological approach in the description of the observed reality and a Bayesian approach to represent the experience and the knowledge of the domain experts. The intelligent system has been developed at a prototypical stage and tested with a complex scenario created with a simulator. The results are encouraging and indicate that this is a promising direction to go. © 2012 IEEE.