Recently in Aviation Category

Following on from my pre-event bloggage  I thought I'd sum up my thoughts on the three days I spent at the Brussels OGC TC ...

Firstly this TC (Technical Committee) continued the pattern of the last three, more new faces, more content and a bewildering amount of parallel sessions on all things standards. In the last couple of years the OGC has been developing more and more standards and as a result its membership continues to grow (particularly in Europe).  

Hosted at EUROCONTROL in Brussels, this OGC TC had a distinct Aviation feel about it, which pretty much kept Debbie and I busy for the first three days.  Not just that but this was the first TC that Snowflake sponsored and I'm pretty proud that we were able to do our bit to help our friends at the OGC out.  

Starting early Monday morning, I attended a really great session on INSPIRE in the amazing Europa conference hall at EUROCONTROL. For those of you who haven't been to EUROCONTROL, the Europa hall is a small version of the UN voting chamber with the speaker in the middle with rows and rows of attendees sitting in a circle around the speaker. They even have translation booths at the back (note to the EU - I didn't see a Welsh one).  

Chaired by Athina Trakas from the OGC, Michael Lutz and Ioannis Kanellopoulos from the JRC INSPIRE team gave an update on the current state of Network Services, Data Interoperability and finally the concept of INSPIRE Compliance.  I was due to give a talk on Snowflake's experience of INSPIRE but given the really active discussion and questions there was major overun and my talk got bumped onto the following day at the Europe forum.  You can get a copy of my slides on Slideshare.

The discussion during the Monday INSPIRE session was really interesting and included my two biggest issues with INSPIRE:

1) Is a standalone Transformation Service required?

2) What is INSPIRE compliance?

Firstly, in addressing the requirement for the Transformation Service the JRC made it very clear that a standalone Transformation Service is an optional requirement and its up to member states on whether they want to implement such a thing. As long as organisations create data in accordance with the Implementing Rules then it doesn't matter how its done. The JRC team even went as far as saying they don't expect to update the Transformation specification - so in my mind we probably won't see a data transformation service get stood up as every implementation I've seen so far either embeds the transformation inside the Download Service or performs some offline ETL prior to upload to a Download Service.  Interestingly, the JRC mentioned that they clarified that exact same question with the UK, which led to a question from the audience asking why clarifications are not made public. I couldn't agree more with this and personally think that this would help greatly to stop the rumor mill.

Secondly, the really tricky subject of INSPIRE compliance.  Interestingly this has also come up on the AGI INSPIRE Action Working Group that I sit on.  The problem stems from the fact that the INSPIRE Implementing Rules and the Technical Guidance are not normative documents and so organisations can never really know when they have fully met their INSPIRE obligations and achieved the nirvana of INSPIRE compliance. So what is INSPIRE compliance? Is it when your data is valid to an Annex I, II or III schema and your Network Services pass the appropriate OGC compliance tests? Or, is it more than this and includes Data Completeness and not to forget Data Quality? Unfortunately there wasn't anything that really cleared this up and the most common answer seemed to be ...when you adhere to the Implementing Rules. But given that the implementing rules are not normative it looks like INSPIRE compliance can pretty much mean anything you like as long as it's aligned with the Implementing Rules. In my view, this lack of normative compliance is going to have to change otherwise interoperability is going to suffer badly if not fail altogether.

Okay, onto Aviation. On Monday afternoon I led a two hour session on the Aviation WFS Guidance document that Snowflake (Debbie) has been editing as part of our work in OWS8-AIM testbed.  After much deliberation we've now agreed a way forward to make the final changes to the Web Feature Service (WFS) specification in order for it to support the Temporality Model needed for Aviation. Now that all sounds very detailed (and it is) but we're now at the level of ironing out the last remaining issues for the WFS 2.0 specification to be used in an operational context within the the Air Traffic Management (ATM) industry.  Given that this is the same standard utilised for INSPIRE that's a great message for OGC: the same data standards, the same service standards but two totally different domains.

On Tuesday morning I did some demos of the 3D Globe Aviation Viewer that Snowflake is developing with the University of Southampton using NASA WorldWind, followed in the afternoon by our first face to face get together of the MOSIA consortium. Led by SINTEF, the MOSIA consortium is a group of companies working as Associate Partners on the Single European Sky ATM Research programme (SESAR Joint Undertaking).  For Snowflake, playing one of the lead roles in MOSIA is a massive win for us. We've worked really hard over the last two years to build momentum in the Air Traffic Management (ATM) industry and so being a part of this flagship research programme really puts us in a great place to further develop and grow in the ATM space. We've got some great ideas and I'm really looking forward to getting started in the new year ... should be fun!

Finally on Wednesday, Debbie and I attended the last Aviation DWG session of the TC.  Primarily consisting of results from OWS8-AIM testbed Snowflake got quite a few mentions, firstly in the core OWS8 Engineering Report, then in the Single Authoritative Resource Security ER and finally in the AIXM 5.1 Benchmarking Technical Report - note you'll need to be an OGC member to access it.  If you're into data compression the benchmarking results were fascinating. Developed by AtosOrigin and Atmosphere, the benchmarking work tested delivering AIXM 5.1 over low bandwith comparing numerous compression techniques namely EXI vs FastInfoSet vs gzip vs WinZip.  Now I can't do this excellent piece of work justice in a blog (so please read the report), however, here's my one sentence summary... if you have a small number of coordinates and simple data models then EXI comes out on top, but if you have lots of coordinates and complex models then plain old gzip comes out on top.

For me Wednesday was my last day at the TC, I wish I could have stayed longer but I needed to get back to Snowflake to welcome our new Marketing Manager Cat Stormont. Now Cat seems to be settling in nicely as she's already hassling me for this blog post.

Ian

As you know Snowflake is a big fan of the Open Geospatial Consortium and all things standards. Snowflake has been a member of the OGC since 2002 and we've pretty much attended at least two of the four Technical Commitee meetings (TCs) each year since then, not to mention the 8 OWS Testbeds we've worked on.  

The next TC is a little different for us at Snowflake as we're sponsoring it! Hosted at the EUROCONTROL headquarters in Brussels the November TC has a packed  Agenda. As you'd expect, firstly there's plenty of Aviation on the agenda: there's two meetings of Aviation Domain Working Group and there's an Aviation focused Interoperability Day on the Friday.  On the Monday afternoon, Snowflake is leading the discussion on the WFS profile for Aviation that we authored as part of our OWS8-AIM work.  

Outside of Aviation there are open sessions on INSPIRE, The Internet of Things and the Digital Agenda for Europe and in parallel to those sessions are the meetings of standards in the making. There are two types of meetings at a TC: Standards Working Groups (SWG) and Domain Working Groups (DWG). SWGs are the nitty gritty of standards and in order to attend an SWG you need to be registered beforehand, DWG's are more open groups and tend to focus more on best practice, outreach and discussion around a particular domain. 

If you haven't been to a TC before, its worth a trip. That said, it takes a while to get used to a TC and I'd definite recommend attending the new member orientation on the Monday . The OGC membership is full of some great thought leaders and at times the discussion can get very heated and down in the micro detail.  OGC members are passionate about standards which for a newbie can be a little bemusing, that said this is what these meetings are all about ... to work through the detail so that when a standard hit the streets its well thought through a fit for purpose.

Debbie and I will be in attendance next week so please do catch up with us

Registration is now open, so you can register here

This week, Snowflake Software is exhibiting for the first time at the UK Aerospace, Aviation & Defence (AAD) Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) conference. A sign of what you can expect from Snowflake in the future as we ramp up our activities within the Aviation domain.

Active in the Air Traffic Management (ATM) market since 2008, we've built our reputation through playing a lead role in several FAA/EUROCONTROL sponsored testbeds.

Building on our success within the testbeds, we're also an active consortium member within the FAA Aeronautical Information Management Development (AIM-D) programme and the FAA Special Activity Airspace Pilot. 

Hot off the press

We've also been selected to support SESAR as an Associate Partner as part of the MOSIA Consortium, supporting the framework to modernise information and data exchange (Aeronautical Information Management) within Air Traffic Management.

The conference provides a forum to discuss and exchange concepts and practices related to the newly released National Aerospace Technology Strategy (NATS) within the UK.  It will also provide a check point on the progress for the large scale aviation initiatives NextGen (USA) and SESAR (Europe).

Event details

• Date: Tuesday 20 September 2011 -  Wednesday 21 September 2011
• Where: Magna Science Park, Rotherham, UK
• Conference website: https://ktn.innovateuk.org/web/2nd-aad-ktn-conference/overview

Snowflake at the AAD KTN Conference

Eddie Curtis (CTO) and Debbie Wilson (Business Consultant) will be attending this event where Snowflake Software is exhibiting. If you'd like to talk to us about our solutions for modernsing AIM and our experience with the Aeronautical Information Exhange Model (AIXM) and other aviation data exchange models (such as WXXM, FIXM, Digital NOTAM) then please do drop by the stand.

We'd also be happy to talk about our participation in recent aviation advancement projects such as:

• MOSIA Consortium - (Sesar associate partner)
• FAA Special Activity Airspace (SAA) 
• FAA & EUROCONTROL sponsored OWS-8
• FAA AIM-D
• FAA AIM-OES
• FAA & EUROCONTROL sponsored OWS-7
• EUROCONTROL Digital SNOWTAM project

Hope to see you there!

Melissa Burns | Head of Marketing | melissa.burns@snowflakesoftware.com |

Before I get my flight back home I thought I’d spend 10 minutes writing up this years AIXM Conference or should I say Air Transportation Information Exchange Conference because firstly there’s been a name change – and for good reason! In the past the conference has been the annual stateside get together to discuss AIXM (the Aeronautical Information eXchange Model) however, last year saw the introduction of WXXM (the Weather information eXchange Model) and this year FIXM (the Flight Information eXchange Model) was born, so as you see its not really fair for AIXM to take the limelight – thus the conference name change.

Anyway, onto the conference, this year was held at the NOAA offices in Silver Spring, Maryland and was very well attended I’d say somewhere near the 300-400 mark.  Snowflake had a stand and Debbie and I carried over the usual transatlantic Snowflake marketing machine (see right) but this was no ordinary flight across the pond as Debbie and I were on one of the last flights allowed to land in Washington Dulles before hurricane Irene hit Maryland – to say it was an eventful flight was an understatement, all credit to Virgin for getting us there on time and more importantly alive!

Anyway, really, really, getting back to the conference.  There was a good keynote from Vicki Cox Senior Vice President for NextGen, it was good to hear that prior to joining the FAA Vicki worked on the strategic missile defence initiative and the Hubble programme – now that’s what I call a career.  Interestingly whilst Vicki didn’t think NextGen was even close to the technical challenges of her previous roles she did think NextGen was going to be the most difficult to implement, mainly because of the huge number of stakeholders involved (aka politics).  After the keynote came Nancy Kalinowski who had a nice slide of three witches stirring a caldron of standards soup made of AIXM, WXXM and FIXM - thus the title of my blog post.

As with previous years it was a really busy show for Snowflake mainly because you can’t get a conference so spot on to what we do – data exchange using open standards from the OGC.  With AIXM, WXXM and FIXM all based on GML it’s the closest Snowflake gets to commercial nirvana. 

This year's conference started with the launch of the new FIXM exchange model, so being who I am I just had to download the alpha version of the schema from the FIXM site and run it through GO Loader - after all GO Loader has a generic GML parsing engine so it should work without us having to touch the code.  Guess what? It did, see for yourself (click on the image to get a larger picture).

It just goes to show that if you stick with open standards there can be vendor support ready and waiting to help accelerate adoption. This has to be a thumbs up for GML.

Moving on from FIXM I did notice that there has been a huge amount progress on the weather side, WXXM is moving at quite a pace, there’s a WXXM 2.0 in the pipeline and there was also quite a number of WFS implementations being stood up.  Interestingly one of the talks mentioned that weather information covers about 80% of the data exchanged for ATM, so you can see why it has a lot of momentum at the moment – not to mention all the millions of USD lost because of flight cancelations due to Irene.

Putting the data aside, my favorite session was a trio of talks on the web services side of the data exchange picture. Navin Vembar of the FAA kicked things off explaining the Aeronautical Common Services (ACS) programme, a really interesting programme looking at creating a one-stop shop for authoritative aeronautical information. What makes ACS really interesting is how it relates to some of the thinking we had when I used to work for Ordnance Survey, the idea being you have numerous data capture systems which feed a dedicated data publication system that is solely designed for the distribution of data and services.  The important principle being not to mix data maintenance with data supply as they are two completely different use cases - its good to see that same thinking in a totally different domain.  Not just that but ACS is really forging ahead with WFS 2.0 so again its good to see a new spec getting put through its paces.  Next up Mark Miller of NOAA and Alfred Moosakhanian of the FAA were presenting NNEWs 4-D weather cube, again WFS, WMS and WCS at its core.  The trio of talks was finished off by Roger Li of LFV. Representing SESAR, Roger gave an insight into the creation of the Information Service Reference Model (ISRM) within SESAR.  The ISRM sets out to define a common service definition required to facilitate data exchange throughout Europe, interestingly whilst SESAR is committed to AIXM and WXXM it hasn’t yet drawn any conclusion as to whether it will re-use the OGC service specifications or whether it will create some tighter industry specific ones.  I can definitely see the need for tightened down industry specific services, but personally I think a good approach would be to wrap them around loosely coupled OGC services – a sort of layer cake with the foundation being OGC. What should be avoided it one set of services in the US and a different set in Europe. 

The start of conference season is once again upon us, and we're kicking it off with a trip to the NOAA Science Center in Silver Springs, Maryland.

The event is hosted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and jointly partnered by EUROCONTROL.

The conference provides a forum to discuss and exchange concepts and practices related to major global changes in the rapidly growing Aeronautical Information Management (AIM) community. It will also provide a check point on the progress for the large scale aviation initiatives NextGen (USA) and SESAR (Europe).

Event details

• Date: Tuesday 30 August 2011 -  Thursday 1 September 2011
• Where: NOAA Science Center and Auditorium, Silver Springs, Maryland, USA
• Conference website: https://www.fbcinc.com/faaw/default.aspx
• Agenda item: Day 2 - Wednesday 31 August - OWS-8 presented by Nadine Alameh (OGC)

Snowflake at the Air Transportation Information Exchange Conference

Ian Painter (MD) and Debbie Wilson (Business Consultant) will be attending this event where Snowflake Software is exhibiting. If you'd like to talk to us about our solutions for modernsing AIM and our experience with the Aeronautical Information Exhange Model (AIXM) and other aviation data exchange models (such as WXXM, FIXM, Digital NOTAM) then please do drop by the stand.

At the event, you can also attend a presentation by the Open Geospatial Consortium on the findings from the FAA and EUROCONTROL sponsored AIM tesbed (OWS-8), in which we were a participant.

We'd also be happy to talk about our participation in recent aviation projects such as:

• MOSIA Consortium - (Sesar associate partner)
• FAA Special Activity Airspace (SAA) 
• FAA & EUROCONTROL sponsored OWS-8
• FAA AIM-D
• FAA AIM-OES
• FAA & EUROCONTROL sponsored OWS-7
• EUROCONTROL Digital SNOWTAM project

For more details of conferences and events coming up, please take a look on our events webpages.

Melissa Burns | Head of Marketing | melissa.burns@snowflakesoftware.com