The ICARUS Ontology: A general aviation ontology developed using a multi-layer approach

Abstract

The management of aviation data is a great challenge in the aviation industry, as they are complex and can be derived from heterogeneous data sources. To handle this challenge, ontologies can be applied to facilitate the modelling of the data across multiple data sources. This paper presents an aviation domain ontology, the ICARUS ontology, which aims at facilitating the semantic description and integration of information resources that represent the various assets of the ICARUS platform and their use. To present the functionality and usability of the proposed ontology, we present the results of querying the ontology using SPARQL queries through three use case scenarios. As shown from the evaluation, the ICARUS ontology enables the integration and reasoning over multiple sources of heterogeneous aviation-related data, the semantic description of metadata produced by ICARUS, and their storage in a knowledge-base which is dynamically updated and provides access to its contents via SPARQL queries.