A web services based approach for aviation emergency response

Aviation emergency response is increasingly important with fast growth of air transport industry. Information technology and communication infrastructures are crucial to the success of emergency response activities. However, current networks and message types for aviation have inadequacies and limitations, such as lack of reliability, extensibility, flexibility and efficiency. To deal with these problems, we introduce an integrated approach in this paper and present a corresponding prototype implementation. In this approach, aircraft are used as communication relays, XML is used to format messages, Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) is used to define built-in emergency detecting and response rules, Web services are used to coordinate emergency response activities.