The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) conducted the SWIM Discovery Service (SDS) Technical Review Workshop (virtual) on September 9, 2020.
This 3-hour community workshop was used by the FAA to solicit feedback from the OGC technical community on the FAA SDS Implementation Specification (“SDS Spec”). The workshop afforded attendees an opportunity to provide and review technical feedback regarding the new SDS specification directly with the FAA SWIM team. Participants relayed feedback on the spec’s design and modeling, expected ease of implementation by developers, and scalability at a global level.
Workshop findings were documented in this Summary Report. Additional background information is provided below.
Background
The SDS Spec describes the enabling technologies and practices that support service discovery among independently developed and autonomously managed discovery mechanisms. The specification is designed to work specifically to improve service discovery across SWIM environments and to improve inter-SWIM interoperability discovery.
Service discovery is a critical success factor for the overall usability of a service. If a potential service consumer is unable to find a service, then a shared information environment like SWIM fails to achieve its purpose. At its most general level, service discovery is a process of locating information about services that may meet service consumer business needs.
Who Responded to the Call for Participation?
- Members of the OGC Aviation Domain Working Group.
- Representatives of Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSP), including developers, modelers, implementers, technical managers, and members of their SWIM teams.
- Software developers/technical managers from non-Aviation domains who had encountered similar use cases in their environments.
Why Respond?
The workshop represented an excellent opportunity for the community to gain insights into what the FAA will be using to expose its own SWIM registry and services to the world. As such, it was also an opportunity to inject lessons learned from other domains and participants’ own experiences to accelerate the development of the specification and its uptake at a global level. Participants were able to influence inter-SWIM service discovery amongst ANSPs and improve global SWIM interoperability.
Invitations to Participate
OGC members and non-members alike were invited to contribute. International representation was strongly encouraged from Europe, Canada, and the APAC region.
To get an invitation, participants were required to email with the following information:
- Name of organization.
- Point of contact and contact information.
- Type of organization (ANSP, product provider, application provider, etc).
- Industry (Aviation, Environmental, Earth Observation, multiple) and your experience in service discovery.
- Initial comments on the SDS:
- Does the architecture describe the right behavior, information and resource models?
- Are the interface requirements adequate for service discovery across SWIMs?
- Are the security requirements sufficiently stated?
- Does this model align with your experience with service discovery as designed and implemented in other domains?
- What would you recommend changing before this specification is implemented?
- Do you have any feedback with regard to ease of implementation, interoperability and scalability of the specification?
- Optional: comments may be included in a copy of the SDS Implementation Spec Comments and Resolutions form.
For questions and feedback, reach out to innovation@ogc.org with the subject “FAA SDS Spec Workshop”.
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