Making Expert Knowledge Explicit to Facilitate Tool Support for Integrating Complex Information Systems in the ATM Domain

Abstract

The capability to provide a platform for flexible business services in the Air Traffic Management (ATM) domain is both a major success factor for the ATM industry and a challenge to integrate a large number of complex and heterogeneous information systems. Most of the system knowledge needed for integration is not available explicitly in machine-understandable form, resulting in time-consuming and error-prone human tasks.In this paper we propose a knowledge-based ap-proach, Semantically-Enabled Externalization of Knowledge for the ATM domain (SEEK-ATM), which explicitly models a) expert knowledge on specific heterogeneous systems and integration requirements; and b) allows mapping of the specific knowledge to the general ATM problem domain knowledge for semantic integration. The domain-specific modeling enables a) to verify the integration knowledge base as requirements specification for later design of technical systems integration and b) to provide an API to the prob-lem space knowledge to facilitate tool support for efficient and effective systems integration. Based on an industry case study, we evaluate effects of the proposed SEEK-ATM approach in comparison to traditional system integration approaches in the ATM domain.