A Software System for the Discovery of Situations Involving Drivers in Storms

Abstract

We present an environmental software system that obtains, integrates, and reasons over situational knowledge about natural phenomena and human activity. We focus on storms and driver directions. Radar data for rainfall intensity and Google Directions are used to extract situational knowledge about storms and driver locations along directions, respectively. Situational knowledge about the environment and about human activity is integrated in order to infer situations in which drivers are potentially at higher risk. Awareness of such situations is of obvious interest. We present a prototype user interface that supports adding scheduled driver directions and the visualization of situations in space-time, in particular also those in which drivers are potentially at higher risk. We think that the system supports the claim that the concept of situation is useful for the modelling of information about the environment, including human activity, obtained in environmental monitoring systems. Furthermore, the presented work shows that situational knowledge, represented by heterogeneous systems that share the concept of situation, is relatively straightforward to integrate.