Rule-based support for situation management

The notion of situation enables designers, maintainers, and users to abstract from lower-level entities and properties and to focus on the higher-level patterns that emerge in time. Situation management concerns a number of tasks including situation specification, situation detection (which may involve composite situation pattern recognition), and situation’s life cycle control. This chapter discusses how to approach situation management from a rule-based perspective. We present a rule-based situation management infrastructure to support the development of situation-aware applications and show its applicability to a scenario in the public health domain, concerning situations for detecting influenza epidemics.