NASA Air Traffic Management Ontology with US Airspace Instances

NASA's Air Traffic Management Ontology defines classes, properties, and relationships for air traffic management components in US and global airspace. It includes three variants: atmontoCore, atmonto, and atmontoPlus, with the latter adding instances of US National Airspace System infrastructure. The ontology covers flights, aircraft, airports, airlines, routes, facilities, advisories, and weather phenomena.

Use Cases

• Extend the atmontoPlus variant with new instances for airports, airlines, or aircraft manufacturers to model specific NAS infrastructure.
• Query the ontology's defined relationships between flights, air routes, and weather phenomena to analyze potential operational impacts.
• Use the core ontology classes and properties to build a knowledge graph integrating external air traffic and weather data sources.

Strengths

• Developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a leading aerospace authority.
• Covers a broad domain including flights, aircraft, airports, airlines, routes, facilities, advisories, and weather phenomena.
• Provides three structured variants (atmontoCore, atmonto, atmontoPlus) for different modeling needs.

Limitations

• Data is provided only as an HTML document, not in standard ontology formats like OWL or RDF, which may complicate direct machine processing.
• The ontology's practical utility for specific analyses depends on user-provided instance data, as only atmontoPlus includes pre-defined NAS instances.
• The 'notspecified' license status creates uncertainty for commercial or redistribution use cases.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Ontology engineering and formal specification.

Freshness

Last updated on 2025-08-23.

Geography

Primarily the US National Airspace System, with relevance to global airspace.