The 2007 International Symposium for Aviation Psychology had as its theme, the Airspace as a Cognitive System. That motivated me to ponder the nature of a cognitive system and to offer a view of what it might mean to consider the Airspace as a Cognitive System. The figure I developed to depict my perspective is shown below: workers with diverse roles use diverse technological systems to coordinate a complex, distributed system as they go about their work.

I presented on this topic at the 2007 symposium.  I subsequently published a more extensive paper in The International Journal of Aviation Psychology and another brief paper on a general cognitive system in Language Sciences.  Additionally, I have a video presentation that lays out the basics. All can be accessed via links in the left panel below.