A Novel Framework for Event Interpretation in a Heterogeneous Information System

Abstract

Over the last decade, the number of research and development projects on sensor network technology has grown exponentially. Events detection is among these research fields, it allows the monitoring of the environment. To build an interpretation to these events, the combination of sensor network and document corpus data is essential since document corpus provide significant amounts of important and valuable information (e.g., technical data sheets, maintenance reports, customer sheets). However, most information systems in connected environments do not support the interconnection of sensor network and document corpus data, hence, user has to look for an explanation by himself through multiple queries on both data sources which is indeed very tedious, time consuming and requires a huge compilation effort. In this paper, we show that recent researches on 5W1H question-answering ("What? Who? Where? When? Why? How?") are an interesting issue to facilitate tunnelling through heterogeneous data sources (sensor networks and document corpus) and the identification of relevant data for the purpose of explaining an event. Consequently, we propose ISEE (an Information System for Event Explanation), a framework for event interpretation based on (i) the semantic representation of a heterogeneous information system, (ii) the cross-analysis of both sensor network and document corpus data and (iii) 5W1H question-answering techniques.