A great deal of information is produced and consumed by many parties for every flight movement that occurs. Information is exchanged between business partners (B2B), between businesses and individuals (B2C) and between businesses and government agencies (B2G). The ACI ACRIS (Aviation Community Recommended Information Services) initiative was created to improve the quality of information being exchanged by providing standards such as industry, information and technology standards. Standardising Aviation services facilitates integration and semantic inter-operability between aviation systems, whether in airport, airline, air traffic management, or third party vendors.
Airport business performance depends on seamless and meaningful information exchange. Effective communication requires a common business vocabulary, with well defined terminology. This common vocabulary is the foundation of ACI’s Semantic Model. Knowledge is held about airlines, passengers, assets and other core factors in the Airport. These business concepts represent the smallest grain of business knowledge. The terms used to describe these concepts form the business vocabulary. The Semantic Model defines the concepts, their characteristics, the relationships between them, and how they behave. This provides a framework for semantic inter-operability within which different applications can cooperate with each other. The applications may be within, or between, businesses e.g. an Airport sharing gate information with an Airline.
The model contains four layers: the business language context layer, the knowledge layer, the data element library of re-usable components, and the physical (technology) layer. Information artefacts can be derived directly from the model. These include for example, XSDs and JSON schemas, REST APIs and database scripts.
Rockport is an active member of the ACI ACRIS working group that is responsible for the definition of standards for information exchange. We have been heavily involved in the development of the ACRIS Semantic Model and have extensive experience using the Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect tool. Please contact us to find out how to benefit from this initiative.
It has never been more important for an airport to base its decisions on trusted and reliable information. The ACRIS Semantic Model is a powerful tool to enable airports get easy access to timely and consistent information, both from internal and external sources.
As the world leading experts on the ACRIS Semantic Model, Rockport Software is uniquely placed to help airports and their partners to obtain the substantial benefits that the Model provides. For example to reduce costs, reduce carbon footprint, improve asset usage, and deliver solutions more quickly than ever.
We offer formal and bespoke services to suit the needs of organisations of any size:
A number of information projects based on the Semantic Model have either been completed or are underway. These include:
Please contact Rockport to find out how to get involved with, and benefit from, these initiatives.
In 2019, the United States Senate mandated that all US airports must provide travellers with consistent and comparable information on checkpoint wait times. The ACRIS working group established the Passenger Queue Measurement project to develop an open API specification that could be used by airports worldwide, based on the ACRIS Semantic Model. The wait times API integrates passenger queue wait times system interfaces from each airport to provide a single access point for information from all participating airports. The use of the ACRIS Semantic Model ensures that the meaning and understanding of information sourced from multiple airports and system providers is consistent and comparable.
The current version of the Semantic Model is v2.7.
The package of Semantic Model XSDs is currently published as v1.0. These services include: Aircraft Movement, Bag Item, Equipment, Facility, IRVR, Passenger Transfer, Planning, Resource Usage, SMGCS, ULD.
The ACRIS Semantic Model is hosted on Rockport's cloud platform on behalf of ACI. Requests for access to the Semantic Model are invited from anyone wishing to participate in ACI information projects.
Please contact us by email to submit your request to obtain access to the ACI Semantic Model. Note that requests for access are subject to review and approval by ACI itself.