10. The Simple Event Model

This chapter introduces the Simple Event Model and shows how it can be used for modeling events and their related concepts like actors, places, times, and their types. The event modeling discussed in this chapter is motivated from the need to abstract over historical situations to analyze what happened in the past. We show how the Simple Event Model can be used to model events by means of two example cases from different domains related to maritime situation awareness, one having to do with AIS ship observations in a harbor area and one having to do with maritime piracy reports. To show how the Simple Event Model can be used in practice for adaptive information access we demonstrate how an analysis of an open data set from the Semantic Web can be done using the Simple Event Model and the SPARQL query language.