Designing and Rationalising a Layered-Mapping Aid for Requirements Elicitation in Air Traffic Control

Abstract

The “Layered Map” is a simple, cheap and portable device used to aid the explanation of complex traffic management scenarios, between field practitioners and operators and during the process of requirements elicitation. It was developed for being adaptable to multiple semantic communities within and across different ontologies of work in air traffic control. The study identified a number of factors influencing the design of aids, namely: i) emerging knowledge coordination, ii) ontological compatibility, iii) jargon and linguistic interpretation, iv) cultural traffic management practices, v) software development, and vi) gesture-based interaction. The construction of the layered-map involves three layers of material: i) the base, ii) the modifier, and iii) the interactor. The layered-map utilises semiotics to define three different modes of knowledge coordination. The rationale used to represent these modes of coordination is the representational adaptability of the different physical layers of the layered map. Thus, a conceptual bridge is elicited as a means of generalising the mapping of: i) syntactic knowledge to the base layer, mainly for representation, ii) semantic knowledge to the modifier layer, mainly for learning, and iii) pragmatic knowledge to the interactor layer, mainly for transformation.