Integrating global aviation data with temporal and spatial weather information

During the last few years, the fast and accurate exchange of information between players in various domains has become increasingly critical. This is especially true in transportation, where the rapid and correct decisions based on high-quality timely data would have not only financial implications (e.g. saving cost of fuel) but it could primarily relate to the safety of people. Messages are naturally exchanged using different standards, e.g. in aviation a weather message would differ from an airport notification message. Hence, it is often a challenge for the end user to be able to integrate and analyse the information received „on the fly‟, especially when there is a temporal or spatial overlapping of information between messages, or when there are numerous messages. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is the format of choice for describing many standards and exchanging messages; therefore, our research proposes a generic approach to integrate XML messages which have temporal and spatial features. This approach gives the user the ability to apply „time‟ and „space‟ filtering on the resulting integrated data, in order to get a synchronised or an area-focused view of the events. The case study in this paper employs two XML standards used by the aviation industry, namely Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM) and Weather Information Exchange Model (WXXM). We show that the result of „time‟ and „space‟ filtering on the integrated data can help faster decision making in weather related aviation data analysis, for example determining the airspaces affected by a volcanic ash cloud.