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

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 approach, "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 problem 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.