Members of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) recently approved the release of 7 draft public OGC Engineering Reports, products of the recently completed OGC Interoperability Testbed 12 Aviation Thread. Testbed 12’s Aviation Thread was sponsored by FAA and Eurocontrol, and is the most recent in the OGC’s long series of major geospatial interoperability initiatives.
The 7 released draft engineering reports focus on Aviation Information Management, specifically:
•Semantics – Managing complexity from a data consumer point of view, from web feature service to web map service to web coverage service requires understanding in all three interfaces. An end user may only know that they want to see all data relevant about a geographical area pertaining to some keywords.
•FIXM – Flight Information Exchange Model is still under development with the release of version 4. The FIXM community is planning to incorporate GML elements in FIXM to improve interoperability with Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM) and Weather Information Exchange Model (WXXM) which both currently use OGC GML.
•Asynchronous Messaging – OGC web services are primarily request-reply services, which require specific interaction by an end user. Event-based push messaging requires a different interaction, and OGC PubSub Standard Working Group has recently released the PubSub 1.0 Specification. Sponsors are seeking a reference implementation from the Testbed.
The reports document interoperability prototypes developed by the Aviation Thread’s participating technology providers, and describe work in progress on potential new OGC standards, as well as work done to validate candidate standards or improve existing OGC standards. While OGC Engineering Reports are not standards, the information they contain is intended to be useful to developers and implementers of OGC standards.
The draft Testbed 12 Aviation Engineering Reports are available at docs.opengeospatial.org/per/, and include:
•Aviation Architecture Engineering Report
•Catalog Services for Aviation
•Asynchronous Messaging for Aviation
•Aviation Semantics Engineering Report
•FIXM GML Engineering Report
•SBVR Engineering Report
•Data Broker Engineering Report
The final versions of the reports will be published in the coming weeks.
Contact the OGC to learn more about OGC Testbeds and how your organization can become a sponsor or technology provider participant of OGC Testbed 13.
About the OGC
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 525 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at www.opengeospatial.org.
