An Ontology-based Approach for Semantic Interoperability in Air Traffic Information Management

Abstract

With the advancement of information and communication technologies, to improve the interoperability between heterogeneous information systems by regularizing the syntax for information exchange is essential to achieve global seamless air traffic management operation. However, the current point-to-point aviation related information exchange among different systems and operators cannot satisfy the requirement for interoperability. The concept of System Wide Information Management (SWIM) has been promoted by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to implement interoperability and harmonization in a global operation. In the SWIM environment, all the related stakeholders need to efficiently obtain the necessary ATM data with situational awareness from various information domains. However, this is difficult to realize in the current system, as different data are structured based on different data models. In this study, we construct domain ontologies based on flight, aeronautical, and weather information exchange models. Moreover, for semantic interoperability in the SWIM environment, we develop an upper ontology-based reference ontology that enables common situational awareness of spatiotemporal concepts. Furthermore, we propose a methodology for mapping heterogeneous domain ontologies to the reference ontology with the manual refinement. Finally, we apply the proposed ontologies to a SWIM test system. The applicability and scalability of the proposed ontologies are demonstrated through a case study in the SWIM environment.