Existing techniques for distilling situation awareness currently focus on information harvested from either IoT sensors or social media. While the benefits of fusing information from these two distinct information spaces for achieving enhanced situation awareness are well understood, existing techniques and related systems for fusing the IoT sensors and social media information spaces are currently embryonic. Key challenges in intersecting, combining, and fusing these information spaces to distil high-value situation awareness include devising situation models and related techniques for filtering, integrating, and fusing sparse and heterogeneous IoT sensor data and social media postings to provide a richer and more accurate situation awareness. This paper proposes novel, semantically based techniques fusing social media and IoT sensor information spaces and a comprehensive, fully implemented system that utilizes these to provide enhanced situation awareness. More specifically, this paper proposes the design of semantic-based situation models for fusing sensor and social media information spaces and presents techniques for finding similarities across these information spaces and fusing social media posting and IoT sensor data to generate an enhanced situation awareness. Furthermore, the paper presents the design and implementation of a complete system that uses the proposed models and techniques and uses that in an experimental evaluation that illustrates improvements in situation awareness from fusing the IoT sensor and social media information spaces.
Keywords: IoT; information fusion; situation awareness; situation modelling; social media.