Transportation, Aviation, and Aerospace Track Description

 

This track focuses on utilization of ISO/IEC 11179 and other registries for managing a wide variety of data. The data may be included in information systems or may be the data products of orbiting satellites. The track covers both technical issues about data and data registries as well as organizational issues for managing the development of standard data.

 

Enormous amounts of data are created by national and international aeronautics and space missions. The data products would be of limited value without appropriate descriptive information. ISO/IEC 11179 attributes are useful for documenting data products. Several projects are actively developing and using registries. The Planetary Data System (PDS) has an archive collected from over 30 years of solar system exploration. The archive is geographically distributed to keep the data in the hands of the scientific experts and to promote closer ties with the mission instrument teams. An on-line distributed search and retrieval system is under development. The first delivery of this system will use ISO/IEC 11179 based metadata descriptors, XML documents, and the wealth of metadata in the archive to locate data sets and supporting resources across the discipline nodes of the PDS.

 

NASA/JPL is pursuing an Enterprise Data Architecture task that is developing an integrated information architecture to enable JPL to meet its strategic goals. It promises to provide institutional data management services that promote interoperability between distributed data resources and leverage existing institutional services and enterprise applications. The goal is to enable not only data management, but information and knowledge management. A key component of this architecture is the metadata service. The purpose of the metadata service is to provide a series of registries that allow for the management of enterprise data dictionaries, data elements, and system resource descriptions. The metadata service makes extensive use of the ISO/IEC 11179 specifications. Special emphasis has been given to providing semantic interoperability through the concept of an enterprise data element registry.

Projects are also underway in the aerospace community to make 11179 registries accessible through LDAP. This would provide another means for obtaining standard data and descriptions of data products. A presentation will describe work that is underway.

 

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is operating a metadata registry for the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials (AASHTO), Institute for Transportation Engineers (ITE), IEEE, Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), National electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA), and ASTM International. IEEE is working with U.S. Department of Transportation and US State departments of transportation to develop data standards for rapidly evolving Intelligent Transportation Systems. A dictionary and message set standard, based, in part, on ISO/IEC 11179, was published by IEEE and a similar project has been progressed through the ISO standards development process in ISO TC204, Intelligent Transportation Systems and Transport Information Control Systems. Data standardization efforts are underway and an ITS metadata registry is operational.  Presentations will cover accomplishments and plans.

 

The Federal Aviation Agency is working with industry partners to standardize data. This track will provide an overview and discussion of the FAA Data Registry. This includes a demonstration of the registry and a discussion on the data standardization and approval (i.e. configuration control board) process the FAA has developed. The presentations also cover how the data registry fits into the overall data management program that the FAA is implementing.

 

Return to Open Forum 2003 home page