ONE Record is IATA’s data standard for air cargo — a single, shared, linked-data record of a shipment that every party in the chain reads and writes, replacing the message-passing model of paper waybills and EDI. It is defined as a RESTful API over a linked-data ontology rather than a message schema, which makes it the more modern of IATA’s two flagship standards.
IATA ONE Record
ONE Record is what IATA built after learning from message-based standards. Instead of parties exchanging documents about a shipment, every party publishes to and reads from one shared, linked digital record of that shipment, addressed by URI and served over a RESTful API. It is the cargo counterpart to NDC in passenger distribution, and architecturally it is the better of the two.
- A record, not a message - the shipment is an addressable resource with an ontology behind it, rather than a sequence of documents passed between systems.
- Linked data at the core - built on a published data model and JSON-LD serialization, which makes it unusually well suited to machine consumption without a bespoke integration per party.
- REST rather than XML messaging - a deliberate departure from the EDI and XML lineage that dominates the rest of air freight.
- Security and access are per-party - each participant controls what it publishes on the record and who may read it, which is the consent primitive cargo has always lacked.
What the evidence shows
The State of Canadian Travel APIs profiles the organization that authors this standard. IATA is headquartered in Montreal, writes ONE Record and NDC, runs the accreditation regime, the BSP settlement system, the ticketing resolutions and the PADIS code lists that every airline in the four-market study depends on — and operates an Open API Hub aggregating airline-published APIs for flight status, baggage, ticket validation, cargo and digital identity.
Its own published surface scores 21.5, in the Emerging band, with no MCP server, no packaged agent skills, and an access model that is not self-serve. Canada is the only market in the travel quartet with zero MCP servers anywhere, and that includes the body writing the sector’s standards.
The reading for anyone implementing ONE Record: the standard’s design is genuinely modern, and the distribution of the standard is not. Reaching the specification, its examples and its conformance material is harder than reaching the equivalent material from OpenTravel, a volunteer non-profit with a fraction of the resources that scores 55.1.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This standard shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this standard in the context of a real sector.
The State of Canadian Travel APIs
One of two flagship standards IATA authors from Montreal — while IATA's own published surface scores 21.5 with no MCP server and no packaged agent skills.
