At a SPIE conference, I gave a talk on Situation Awareness. You can see the talk here.
The tools and techniques for determining situation awareness are definitely emerging and are going to be more the tools that will be used in the EventWeb. My students, particularly Mingyan Gao and Vivek Singh, are developing tools that will help first to deal with Twitter and facebook like sources but then will be extended to all kind of sensors. The basic motivation is to identify all micro events taking place so one could aggregate, assimilate, and composite them into situations that could then be used for deciding on the specific actions.
A very pleasant thing was that questions and Prof David Hall’s talk (he followed me) showed that people have started considering Twitter like sources very seriously and are now looking at these as serious information sources. Prof Hall mentioned the recent Portland event that was solved using Twitter several times in his discussion.
Now I have to get ready for the talk on COntenxt tomorrow.