Ontologies for nextgen avionics systems

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) system incorporates many updates to aerospace technology including coordination of air traffic management (ATM), flight deck control, and avionics architectures. One such consideration is the need for ontologies. An ontology is a formal naming and definition of the types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities that exist (and persist) for a particular domain. In aviation, an ontology is needed to organize the variables to afford computations, instructions, and the relationships between parameters. For example Triples are used as Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) in the case of {subject, predicate (verb), object}. The subject and object entities can be connected with the relationship predicate. Together, they are an event such as an ontology coordinating Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) flight weather information. In this paper, we explore the concepts of ontologies for applications to aerospace avionics as motivated by the NextGen and Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) standards.