The solution stack of the m-click.aero Aviation Suite product, which has been utilised in a number of research and commercial projects is based on the deegree framework. Deegree is a GML compatible, open source geographic information system developed to persist, manage, transform and expose all kinds of geographical data. Our Aviation Suite uses unique features of the deegree framework, such as document based data repository, additionally introducting extensions for aviation data formats.

Especially for the domain of AIXM 5.1 data management and processing, we additionally implemented an extended WFS 2.0 compatible query language (WFS-TE), which supports specific temporal characteristics of AIXM 5.1 beyond those provided in the basic WFS. Doing so, m-click.aero uniquely offers the full document based aviation information processing chain without internal data transformations. The aeronautical data is stored and managed exactly the same way how it is originally encoded, as native XML documents. There is no loss of information as it would sometimes be the case, when the AIXM 5.1 documents are converted into an intermediary middleware format (such as Java objects) and than again recomposed into entity relationship form suitable for final persisting in a relational database. The overall performances and scalability is much better compared to standard relational database solutions.

For detailed information please watch the video of a presentation “AIXM WFS and WPS Services – GML Applications in Aviation” (in German) held during the FOSSGIS conference 2014 by our GIS expert Markus Schneider in Berlin. Markus gives an excellent overview of the deegree framework and the m-click.aero aviation extensions.