Techniques for ontology-based data description and discovery in a decentralized SWIM knowledge base

The upcoming System Wide Information Management (SWIM) in air traffic management mandates access to required information via information services in order to ensure common situational awareness among stakeholders. Developing value-added information services and applications in SWIM will encompass finding, selecting, filtering and composition of data/information from different sources (the ‘data logic’). In this respect, semantic containers are a means to encapsulate the data logic and clearly separate it from business and presentation logic; the separation of data logic from business and presentation logic is a commonly accepted principle in software engineering. 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 annotating. Common semantic web technologies are well-suited to implementing the semantic container approach; a mix of semantic web technologies will have to be employed.