The Semantic Container Approach: Techniques for ontology-based data description and discovery in a decentralized SWIM knowledge base

System Wide Information Management (SWIM) in Air Traffic Management (ATM) aims to facilitate access to ATM information via information services, thereby fostering common situational awareness among stakeholders. The development of information services and applications with added value in SWIM will comprise finding, selecting, filtering and composition of data/information from different sources, which is also referred to as ‘data logic’. Semantic containers are a means to encapsulate the data logic and clearly separate it from business and presentation logic. The provisioning of semantic containers for a specific purpose encompasses the discovery of existing source containers and often further value-adding processing steps such as filtering and annotation. Common semantic web technologies may serve to implement the semantic container approach.