Knowledge fusion for distributed situational awareness driven by the wax conceptual framework

Large crisis scenarios involve several actors, acting at the blunt-end of the process, such as rescue team directors, and at the sharp-end, such as firefighters. All of them have different perspectives on the crisis situation, which could be either coherent, alternative or complementary. This heterogeneity of perceptions hinders situational awareness, which is defined as the achievement of an overall picture on the above-mentioned crisis situation. We define knowledge fusion as the process of integrating multiple knowledge entities to produce actionable knowledge, which is consistent, accurate, and useful for the purpose of the analysis. Hence, we present a conceptual modelling approach to gather and integrate knowledge related to large crisis scenarios from locally-distributed sources that can make it actionable. The approach builds on the WAx framework for cyber-socio-technical systems and aims at classifying and coping with the different knowledge entities generated by the involved operators. The conceptual outcomes of the approach are then discussed in terms of open research challenges for knowledge fusion in crisis scenarios.