Introduction

Overview

This service description defines a REST (like) service that can be used to request flight oriented data. All flight related data elements are defined by the ADD.

The service is designed to be easy to use, and can return data in different formats (HTML, XML, JSON). It is primarily meant as a data source for publicly available services, but availability and usage are the decision of the service provider.

In addition to this service description the service provider must have an implementation description defining the URLs to use and and limitations in the actual implementation.

There are a set of use cases that can be realized using this service, for example:

• • Get arrival data for one airport, or for several airports if the implementation supports it.
  • Get departure data for one airport, or for several airports if the implementation supports it.
  • Get turnaround data for one airport, or for several airports if the implementation supports it.
    Turnaround data contains one arrival and the corresponding departure at one airport. 
  • Get flight leg data for one airport, or for several airports if the implementation supports it
    Flight leg data contains the departure and arrival data for one aircraft movement. For one airport this will be flight legs that arrives or departs from the airport. For implementations with several airports, this will be all flight legs, without duplications, that touches one of the airports.

While the entity definitions stay the same, the data they contain related to one flight will change as time goes by. Initially only schedule data will be available. The data content should then steadily increase as the flight progresses, until it is as complete as the service provider can make it.

Implementation considerations

Any implementation of this service MUST use the XSD files provided here: WSDL and XSDs

It is up to the service provider which data elements to support, and how much data to return for requests spanning a long time period. To enable this most elements are optional. The reason for a service provider to not support all elements might be business rules related to data distribution, that it doesn't have the information, or that it wants to provide information in other (more restricted) ways.

Any service provider should make available documentation about the actual implementation, including:

• • the address/URL of the service
  • any limitations in the implementation
  • the airport(s) supported
  • the scope of the data set
  • the default values for parameters
  • recommended and allowed polling intervals
  • any other relevant information.

Who should implement this service

This service is primarily meant for airports that want to make flight related information available in a "standard" way. It can however also be implemented by other providers of flight related information, for instance airlines and helicopter companies.

Purpose of this service description

This service description has the following purpose:

• • • Describe of service in enough detail for a service provider to implement it.
    • Describe the service so that a client (of this service) developer can use it.
    • Make available any definition (XSD) files necessary to implement and use the service.
    • Make it possible for relevant people to understand the available functionality and then to decide if to implement/use it or not.

Intended readership

• • IT architects
  • Developers
  • Business architects
  • Interested parties in the aviation community

Service overview

The figure below shows the available operations on the FlightDataRequestService. The operations are described in detail in Service operations. All operations, apart from GetAlerts, have a basic and a full version. The "basic" version return a simplified data set and should be used where suitable to save processing power and bandwidth.

The operations can retrieve the following types of data:

• Arriving flights
• Departing flights
• Turnarounds (arriving and departing flights connected)
• Flight leg (departure and arrival)
• Alerts

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TBD

Service operations

TBD

Data entities

XML Usage

WSDL and XSDs