Representing and Manipulating Situation Hierarchies using Situation Lattices

Situations, the semantic interpretations of context, provide a better basis for selecting adaptive behaviours than context itself. The definition of situations typically rests on the ability to define logical expressions and inference methods to identify particular situations. In this paper we extend this approach to provide for efficient organisation and selection in systems with large numbers of situations having structured relationships to each other. We apply lattice theory to define a specialisation relationship across situations, and show how this can be used to improve the identification of situations using lattice operators and uncertain reasoning. We demonstrate the technique against a real-world dataset.