OWS-8 Guidelines for Retrieving AIXM 5.1 via an OGC WFS 2.0

One of the key deliverables of the OGC OWS-8 Aviation thread was an Engineering Report provide guidelines for retrieveing AIXM 5.1 via an OGC WFS 2.0 based on experiences gained in OWS-8 and previous OWS projects (OWS-6/7). The need for a guidance report for implementing and configuring a WFS 2.0 to providing access to AIXM 5.1 data for retrieval and maintenance emerged as there were outstanding issues that impact the ability to support flight planning and dispatch use case scenarios. Namely:

• Inconsistent implementation of the WFS 2.0 specification:
  • Not all mandatory operations supported
  • Different sets of query parameters supported
  • Different subsets of filter expressions supported
  • Need to align geometry and temporal data types and operands as defined in the Aviation GML profile with those supported by the WFS 2.0
• Different approaches in configuring how the data should be encoded in the response
  • Encoding individual timeslices within an AIXM feature vs encoding multiple timeslices (i.e. history) within a AIXM feature
  • Support for SNAPSHOT timeslices
  • Support for the AIXM 5 Temporality Model

The scope of this guidelines report is to provide:

1. Overview of the OGC WFS 2.0 specification
2. Recommendations for a minimum set of operations and behaviours that should be supported to ensure consistency across software implementations.
3. Guidance for configuring the WFS 2.0 to retrieve AIXM 5.1 data
4. Summary of potential improvements to WFS/FE 2.0, GML and AIXM 5.1 specifications to better support aeronautical use cases

It is envisaged that this report will provide the base upon which an Aviation WFS application profile can be developed to ensure consistent implementation of the WFS 2.0 specification by vendors.

The final version of the report is available here. Example resources are containing in the supporting zip file.