Ontology for Air Traffic Control Command Annotation - Description

Abstract

The voice communication between air traffic control (ATC) / apron control and aircraft pilots is essential for the safe and efficient flow of air traffic. Despite this fact, technical ATC systems have no access to the information within this verbal communication. Speech Recognition and Understanding technologies can close this gap so that technical systems can access information from the voice communication channel and build downstream applications upon this knowledge. This process requires a clear definition of all relevant information items that can be part of ATC voice communication, e.g., callsign, different kind of commands and so on. For this purpose, this document describes an ontology that conceptually defines relevant elements within ATC communications. This includes the definition of the ontology and relevant elements, best practices on how to get from spoken words to ontology commands and a machine-readable format to transfer the information among different systems.