How Can Web Services Help Civil Aviation?

Summary form only given. The civil aviation system is a global enterprise that includes airframe, engine and component manufacturers, airlines, maintenance organizations, regulatory agencies, airports, air traffic control authorities and millions of service providers that must work together effectively to ensure cargo and passengers get to their destinations as scheduled, while traveling safely and efficiently. The system includes a bewildering array of commercial and custom developed systems for monitoring and controlling the operations of the participant. The news has recently been filled with examples of operations not working as smoothly as we all hope: Passengers have been stranded on taxi-ways, flights cancelled for weather and maintenance inspections and crowds of passengers complaining of lost baggage have become common as civil aviation grows. The growth has been rapid and shows no signs of abating. The available seat-kilometers in China are predicted to grow at over 8% per year for the next decade. The rest of the world will grow between 4 and 6%. We need to find ways to:-Improve communications between manufacturers, airlines and regulatory agencies to defend our unmatched safety record in the face of increasing traffic. - Orchestrate and streamline workflow among the hundreds of collaborating organizations that keep civil aviation functioning. - Improve the services we provide a diverse flying public to increase their enjoyment of the travel experience Web services, network technologies and service oriented architectures provide a means of improving communications between heterogeneous systems that make up our civil aviation transportation system. A Web service is a software component that supports interoperable component- to-component interaction over a network. Each service makes its functionality available through well-defined or standardized XML interfaces. Web services do not work together by coincidence. Smoothly interacting systems in a network of the scale described here will require initial investment in building an enabling platform. Crafting a service-oriented architecture is the first step towards this infrastructure. Openness and standardization are key ways to accumulate resources and spread the risk of capitalization. This panel focuses on finding a vision and roadmap for initiating an open civil aviation Web service platform that is sustainable and self actuating in the long run.