The NASA ATM (Air Traffic Management) Ontology describes classes, properties, and relationships relevant to the domain of air traffic management, and represents information pertinent to a broad and diverse set of interacting components in the US and the global airspace, including flights, aircraft, manufacturers, airports, airlines, air routes, facilities, air traffic advisories, weather phenomena, and many others. Three different variants of the ATM Ontology are provided: atmontoCore, atmonto, and atmontoPlus. The atmonto variant extends the core ontology by adding instances corresponding to key infrastructure components of the US National Airspace System (NAS). (See Ontology Variants, below, for descriptions of the other two variants.)
The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA)
Air Traffic Management (ATM) ontology was developed as a key
component of a semantic data integration system built to support
integration, query, and search over multiple sources of
heterogeneous ATM data, including data from the US Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA), the US National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA, and other
non-governmental providers (see acknowledgements
for a complete listing of data providers). In this data
integration system, the ATM Ontology is used to bridge multiple
types of aviation data models and enable cross-datasource
querying; the ontology serves as a backbone upon which to
overlay data from multiple sources. The ontology data model is
scoped sufficiently broadly to interconnect data from several
different aviation realms, including flight, traffic management,
aeronautical information, weather, and carrier operations.
Representative entities modeled within the ontology include the
following:
There are three interrelated ontologies in the ATM Ontology
suite: atmontoCore (URI: https://data.nasa.gov/ontologies/atmontoCore),
atmonto (URI:
https://data.nasa.gov/ontologies/atmonto), and atmontoPlus
(URI: https://data.nasa.gov/ontologies/atmontoPlus).
Ontology files can be imported into an Ontology Development
Environment (ODE) by loading any one of the three ontology
URIs listed in Section 2.
Individual ontology files, as well as a zipped folder of all
ontology files, can be downloaded from links in the following
subsections. All of the ontology files use the key namespace
definitions shown in Table 1.
nas |
<https://data.nasa.gov/ontologies/atmonto/NAS#> |
atm |
<https://data.nasa.gov/ontologies/atmonto/ATM#> |
data |
<https://data.nasa.gov/ontologies/atmonto/data#> |
eqp |
<https://data.nasa.gov/ontologies/atmonto/equipment#> |
gen |
<https://data.nasa.gov/ontologies/atmonto/general#> |
The atmontoCore ontology defines the core,
foundational concepts and properties of the ATM Ontology. (No
instances are included in atmontoCore.) The ontology
file and its associated import files are shown in Table 2.
Filename |
Description |
Download |
|
atmontoCore |
Defines the atmontoCore ontology,
which imports the other files listed in this table |
rdf |
ttl |
NAS | Defines concepts related to the structure of the US National Airspace System (NAS) | rdf |
ttl |
ATM |
Defines specific air traffic management concepts used in aircraft navigation through the NAS | rdf |
ttl |
data |
Defines concepts related to airport status, including weather, forecasts, and airport operations | rdf |
ttl |
equipment |
Defines aircraft models, aircraft systems / subsystems, and aircraft characteristics | rdf |
ttl |
general |
Defines temporal / spatial concepts and general-purpose datastructures | rdf |
ttl |
The atmonto ontology makes certain infrastructure
components of the NAS concrete by including instances of all
major NAS structures (ATCCC, ARTCCs, TRACONs, sectors, fixes,
routes, airports, etc.), along with information about the
airlines and aircraft manufacturers that utilize the NAS. The
atmonto ontology imports atmontoCore, plus
the instance files in Table 3.
Filename |
Description |
Download |
|
atmonto |
Defines the atmonto ontology, which imports the atmontoCore ontology and the other infrastructure instance files listed in this table | rdf |
ttl |
acManufInst | aircraft manufacturers | rdf |
ttl |
acModelInst | aircraft models and types | rdf | ttl |
airlineInst | airlines | rdf | ttl |
airportInst | airports, runways, terminals, gates | rdf | ttl |
NASinst | US Air Traffic Control Command Center (ATCCC) and Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) en-route facility instances | rdf | ttl |
ARTCCLocationInst | Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) en-route facility boundary polygons and adjacency tiers | rdf | ttl |
equipmentInst | aircraft characteristics (weight class, wake category, engine type) | rdf | ttl |
fixInst | air navigation fixes | rdf | ttl |
routeInst | defined US federal air routes (airways) | rdf | ttl |
SectorLocationInst | en route airspace sector definitions, boundary polygons, and boundary layers | rdf | ttl |
sidStarInst | Standard Instrument Departure routes (SIDs) and Standard Arrival Routes (STARS) | rdf | ttl |
TRACONinst | Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facilities | rdf | ttl |
The atmontoPlus ontology imports atmonto, plus the
additional instance files in Table 4,
representing flight data and associated contextual data for a
sample of 100 flights arriving at or departing from the three
major New York area airports (JFK, LGA, EWR) on 15 July 2014.
Filename |
Description |
Download |
|
atmontoPlus |
Defines the atmontoPlus ontology, which imports the atmonto ontology and the other flight-related instance files listed in this table | rdf |
ttl |
flightInst | flights, along with filed flight plans and the actual navigation paths traversed by the 100 sample flights | rdf |
ttl |
acInst | registration details for aircraft used in flying the 100 sample flights | rdf | ttl |
ASPMinst | hourly airport conditions for the three New York airports during July 2014 | rdf | ttl |
dayInst | days from 2012-2017 plus the 24 hours of a day | rdf | ttl |
METARinst | hourly airport weather conditions for the three New York airports during July 2014 | rdf | ttl |
TAFinst | hourly airport weather forecast for the three New York airports during July 2014 | rdf | ttl |
TMIinst | Traffic Management Initiatives (TMIs) issued by the FAA during July 2014 | rdf | ttl |
The ATM Ontology incorporates selected information from the
following data sources, extracted for the month of July, 2014:
Complete documentation for the core classes and properties
defined by the ATM Ontology is published in NASA Technical
Memo #2017-219526: "The
NASA Air Traffic Management Ontology: Technical
Documentation."
In addition, auto-generated HTML-based ontology class and
property documentation can be found at https://data.nasa.gov/ontologies/atmontoCore/doc.
The figures below (all extracted from the abovementioned NASA
Technical Memo) provide some intuition about how the classes
and properties represent the structure, content, and
relationships found in ATM data. Only a subset of available
figures is shown here; please consult the NASA Technical Memo
for additional illustrations.
An illustration of the key relationships among selected New York area airspace structure and facility instances. Sector nas:ZNYsector075 is one of the sectors located in the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC instance nas:ZNYcenter). Sector 075 is composed of two stacked horizontal layers of airspace, each represented by a shear-sided polygon of a certain height (only one polygon is depicted in the figure). The ZNY ARTCC has operational agreements with the FAA command center and the New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facility, which in turn has agreements with each of the airports in its territory. The ZNY Tier 1 structure contains all ARTCCs that directly border the ZNY ARTCC. (Note that only a small subset of instances is illustrated in order to keep the figure uncluttered and readable.)
This
figure illustrates the basic components of the ontology
representation of a flight -- in this illustration, Delta
Airlines flight DAL435 on 2014-07-15. The
flight is associated with its departure and arrival
airports; the aircraft, aircraft type, and operating
carrier; and the actual and planned flight route.
This figure illustrates the relationships among
instances of aircraft, carrier, flight, model,
manufacturer, and other classes associated with Delta
Airlines flight DAL435 on 2014-07-15 (shown in Figure 2,
above). The aircraft flown for this flight is N713TW, a
Boeing model 757-2Q8, one of the B757-200 family of
aircraft. The aircraft family is represented as a model
class and the the specific model is represented as an
instance of that class. The FAA also designates an
aircraft type, which may cover models in multiple
aircraft families. The aircraft type for model 757-2Q8
is B752. Associated with type B752 aircraft are a set of
instances that describe the engine type, wake turbulence
category, and weight class of all B752 type aircraft.
This
figure illustrates how the actual and planned flight
routes for American Airlines Flight #AAL335 are
connected to the flight instance
(atm:AAL335-201407150017), which is depicted at the root
of the tree structure shown. The actual flight route is
represented as a sequence of track points
(atm:AircraftTrackPoint). Each track point represents a
specific reporting time when the aircraft’s fix and
speed is captured and relayed to ground systems. The
track points are each linked to an instance of
atm:LatLonFix, which stores the latitude, longitude, and
altitude. The planned flight root is detailed in Figure
5 below.
This
figure elaborates on the representation for the flight
plan (atm:PlannedRouteAAL335-201407150017) shown at the
root of this tree and also in Figure 4. The flight plan
includes a flight route string
‘KLGA./.CFB..RAAKK.Q436.EMMMA.WYNDE5.KORD’, which is a
representation of the path to be flown through the
airspace. The flight route string is initially filed by
the pilot prior to takeoff and modified as needed en
route. The root node in the graph contains this route
string as a property, but the string is also converted
into an explicit sequence of ‘container’ nodes that
include (via the property atm:hasNavElement) the major
navigational components through which the flight is
planned to progress: the originating airport (KLGA); a
VOR fix (CFB); a portion of a high-altitude flight route
(Q436); a traverse through a standard terminal arrival
route (STAR WYNDE5); and the destination airport (KORD).
This work was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration under the Aviation Operations and Safety
Program.
The NASA Air Traffic Management Ontology incorporates data
from the following providers, and NASA gratefully acknowledges
their contribution: