The DLR department “Controller Assistance“ including Hartmut Helmke, Matthias Kleinert and Oliver Ohneiser developed a set of rules to interpret air traffic control radio utterances. This so-called ontology has been drafted for approach control in 2017. Since then, it has been agreed with the major European air traffic management stakeholders and it was enhanced to cover en-route, tower, and apron as well as clearances, readbacks, reportings, and requests of both – controllers and pilots. This powerful guidance material for speech understanding in air traffic control has now been released without access restrictions. The timing aligns with the meeting of EUROCAE working group 126 to standardize “ATC Systems Integration for ATM Information Exchange” at DLR Braunschweig on July 3 and 4, 2025. The ontology serves as an important input for EUROCAE’s standardization of exchanging ATM speech information in ATC systems.
The public domain release is available at https://s.dlr.de/ontologyatccommands. It contains a description of the 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. The ontology description and table will be maintained and enhanced at irregular intervals.