EUCISE-OWL: An ontology-based representation of the Common Information Sharing Environment (CISE) for the maritime domain

Abstract

The timely and efficient cooperation across sectors and borders during maritime crises is paramount for the safety of human lives. Maritime monitoring authorities are now realizing the grave importance of cross-sector and cross-border information sharing. However, this cooperation is compromised by the diversity of existing systems and the vast volumes of heterogeneous data generated and exchanged during maritime operations. In order to address these challenges, the EU has been driving several initiatives, including several EU-funded projects, for facilitating information exchange across sectors and borders. A key outcome from these efforts is the Common Information Sharing Environment (CISE), which constitutes a collaborative initiative for promoting automated information sharing between maritime monitoring authorities. However, the adoption of CISE is substantially limited by its existing serialization as an XML Schema only, which facilitates information sharing and exchange to some extent, but fails to deliver the fundamental additional benefits provided by ontologies, like the richer semantics, enhanced semantic interoperability and semantic reasoning capabilities. Thus, this paper presents EUCISE-OWL, an ontology representation of the CISE data model that capitalizes on the benefits provided by ontologies and aims to encourage the adoption of CISE. EUCISE-OWL is an outcome from close collaboration in an EU-funded project with domain experts with extensive experience in deploying CISE in practice. The paper also presents a representative example for handling information exchange during a maritime crisis as well as performance results for specific querying tasks that can demonstrate and evaluate the use of the proposed ontology in practice.