SOA and OGC Standards for Aeronautical Information Management (AIM) - Part 1

In October 2009 the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) kicked off its sixth Web Services Interoperability Initiative (OWS-6). This six month global effort investigated prototypes, and implemented and tested interoperability standards. Among the five threads of the testbed was the Aeronautical Information Management (AIM) thread. Sponsored mainly by the U.S. Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) and EUROCONTROL, various federal agencies and commercial companies collaborated in the testing of emerging standards and implemented cutting edge technologies following an aviation scenario.

Services were developed and provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Snowflake Software (UK) and University of Münster (Germany) using data provided by the FAA, NOAA, EUROCONTROL, Lufthansa and FedEx. The Carbon Project was selected to apply its expertise developing geospatial solutions and develop a client application that demonstrates how these next generation standards and services may be used by an onboard Electronic Flight Bag (EFB).

Through the OWS-6 testbed we found that the combination of our skills, software tools and OGC standards provide an ideal fit to NextGen SOA requirements. In particular, the next generation of digital information flowing in and out of the cockpit will be rich in details including temporal information as well as robust geospatial elements. The chosen base specifications for AIM are OGC/ISO Geography Markup Language (GML) and a derivative called Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM), and the OGC/ISO Web Feature Services (WFS) standard. These standards provide the current and future base for aeronautical information system interoperability requirements.

In the next two weeks CarbonCloud blog will be featuring the results of OWS-6 in this thread - and I hope you'll check in for the discussion. Examples of geospatial SOA for AIM in action are also available on YouTube.

- Jeff H and Nuke G