SemNOTAM Container Management with a Task-Based Retrieval Service

Ensuring smooth and safe air traffic requires a lot of information and calls for efficient and effective air traffic management (ATM). ATM consists of air traffic control (ATC), air traffic flow management (ATFM), and aeronautical information services (AIS). AIS provide relevant information to the users of the airspace, especially pilots, in the form of information messages, so-called Notices to Airmen (NOTAMs). Currently, the communication between stakeholders takes place via point-to-point connections yielding a tight coupling. Hence, information is not shared within the whole community and needs to be provided for each stakeholder separately. To overcome these drawbacks, System Wide Information Management (SWIM) reorganizes information management and communication in ATM. The project “Achieving the BEnefits of SWIM by making smart use of Semantic Technologies” (BEST) contributes to the SWIM approach by introducing data containers that group a set of NOTAMs by different characteristics. The segmentation of the whole NOTAM set is needed to reduce the set of NOTAMs that is used for querying or filtering for relevant NOTAMs. The created data containers are provided by data producers in the SWIM environment and can be used by several stakeholders, i.e., the data consumers. To ensure that data producers and data consumers have a common understanding of the contents of the data containers, a common vocabulary is necessary. To enable the task-based retrieval of relevant NOTAMs, this thesis leverages the briefing application of the project SemNOTAM, which allows a fine-grained filtering and querying of NOTAMs by using a combination of a rule- and ontology-based approach. This thesis covers the conceptualization, the design, and the implementation of the three main components for a SWIM environment. This includes an ontology for managing a vocabulary to describe data containers, a web application for managing these data containers, and services that serve this application and enable task-based retrieval of NOTAMs with a briefing application, e.g., SemNOTAM. Therefore, a requirements analysis is conducted, which defines the functionality, inputs and outputs, as well as the business logic for the implementation. Based on the resulting requirements, an approach for developing the three components is developed. An ontology for the common vocabulary is developed and prototypes for the Container Management Application as well as the services for task-based retrieval of relevant NOTAMs are implemented. The resulting management application is demonstrated with exemplary data containers concerning Europe. Finally, the functionality of the task-based retrieval service is exemplified based on a use case flight from Vienna to Frankfurt.