OGC Web Services Testbed
The Aviation Information Management (AIM) subtask is a new thread within the OGC Web Services testbed. It is intended to develop and demonstrate the use of AIXM in an OGC Web Services environment. The AIM subtask is focused on evaluating and advancing various AIXM features in a realistic trans-Atlantic aviation scenario setting by devising and prototyping a Web Services Architecture for providing valuable aeronautical information directly to flight decks, Electronic Flight Bags (EFB), and hand-held devices (such as PDAs and Blackberries) while the airplane is at the gate or en-route to its destination (for the purposes of OWS-6, the aeronautical information in the latter case does not depend on the knowledge of the airplane’s location).
Diagram of the AIM Scenario
The key objective of the AIM thread in OWS-6 was to develop next generation concepts for air traffic control, in particular the ability to automatically and reliably distribute aeronautical and weather information, on a request or on an “as changed” basis, to pilots and to avionics systems.
The main focus of the project was to implement a message brokering system based on a Publication/Subscription infrastructure to mediate and transform xNOTAM messages based on the AIXM5 GML application schema between publishers and subscribers and to integrate other data sources based on different XML schemas such as WXXM.
AIM Architecture
Within the AIM thread, Galdos was responsible for the following tasks:
- Author of the AIM event-driven notification architecture document (Engineering Report) that addressed the change alert notification (xNOTAM) use cases.
- Recommendations of adaptations and extensions to the AIM schemas and data (for both aviation and weather), OGC Web Service standards and AIM use case scenarios.
The intention of the event-driven notification architecture document is to standardize: event descriptions, notification logic and advertisement/publication/subscription to service offerings, among other things.
Galdos provided architectural and technology recommendations and the implementation advice for open standards such as WS-Notification, WS-Security, and the WS-ReliableMessaging stack of protocols from OASIS/W3C.
