Towards the New Era of Global Aviation Electronic Data Exchange: Ensuring Completeness, Consistency and Quality in Data Migration

Due to the increasing reliance on electronic data exchange in the transportation industry, there is a real need for a standard representation to ensure data consistency and correctness. The Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM) is an international XML-based emerging standard for aviation data, endorsed by the Open Geospatial Consortium, which has been adopted by Air Navigation organisations around the world including Euro control, FAA, and Air services Australia. The AIXM schema provides a structural framework for data representation. However, in order to support global and flexible data interoperability, local extensions and optional elements must be included. This necessary flexibility makes it difficult to ensure completeness and quality. In this paper, we propose an approach for ensuring data consistency and completeness during a global standard adoption process in which an existing aviation legacy database system is translated into AIXM. We have used our approach to design an automated testing application which can be used to compare values of an existing data representation with any XML-based standard, using simple mapping rules defined in a spreadsheet or XML file. We have evaluated the effectiveness and performance of this tool on a very large, operational database, validating the quality of data in both the relational database (source) and AIXM XML instances (destination).