We have been experiencing the digital transformation of the Aeronautical Information Service (AIS) to an Aeronautical Information Management (AIM), the process is going slower than many anticipated initially but it has nevertheless begun including the transition by many States and Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSP) from paper based products to electronic versions of them.
It is still not prime time for the data exchange of digital datasets, at least not as envisioned and described in Annex 15, PANS AIM ICAO Doc 10066 and the still to be released restructured AIS Manual Doc 8126 specifically volume IV I do have my personal thought on how important first steps towards going digital could had started which would allow us to be on a much better position in 2020 2021.
Coming back to the purpose of the post, ICAO is still using PDF format to distribute documents instead of adopting a solution similar to the xml based one for eAIP production, imagine how much easier our life would be if we could just turn on/off the changes and maybe even have hyperlinks to the rationale of them instead of just getting digested copies. AIMIND is short for Aeronautical Information Management Integrated data, it is not a system but an attempt to free from PDF information that can be instead be used in a machine readable alternative, the intention is to provide in csv format those tables currently siloed within PDF so that they can be downloaded and added to any system you can create or just open up with your favorite spreadsheet viewer and run a search on it.
Don’t know if this is going to be useful at the end but I will try to keep an updated copy of CSV. Contributions from the community are always welcome.
AIMIND project has a MIT license and you can access it here https://github.com/antoniolocandro/aimind please do provide your feedback and error reports in the platform itself or as comments to this post.
If you haven’t done it already you can also check this other project which deals about providing aeronautical charting resources
Enjoy
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ICAO ENR 5.4 Obstacle template and the Aeronautical Data Catalogue – Antonio Locandro – Aviation Consultant · February 26, 2021 at 10:32 am
[…] I presented the AIMIND project which included the ICAO Abbreviations in a machine readable format there was a comment about also […]