SWIM is the FAA and EUROCONTROL programme to move air traffic management from point-to-point interfaces to shared, service-oriented information exchange — publishing flight, aeronautical, weather and flow data as discoverable services with a registry, governance and defined message models. It is one of the very few aviation initiatives that is explicitly an API programme rather than a data format, and its registries are among the largest service catalogs any regulator operates.
SWIM
SWIM, System Wide Information Management, is the FAA and EUROCONTROL programme to move air traffic management off point-to-point interfaces and onto shared, service-oriented information exchange — publishing flight, aeronautical, weather and flow data as discoverable services with a registry, governance and defined message models.
- A registry, not just services - The service registries are among the largest catalogs any regulator operates, and they are the part most worth studying.
- Models supplied by others - FIXM for flight, AIXM for aeronautical information, IWXXM for weather. SWIM carries them.
- Governance is the deliverable - Service definition, lifecycle and conformance rules, which is what distinguishes a programme from a protocol.
- Two implementations, one concept - FAA SWIM and the European equivalent are separate programmes pursuing the same architecture.
SWIM is one of very few aviation initiatives that is explicitly an API programme rather than a data format, and that makes it unusually interesting. A regulator running a governed service catalog with published models and a discovery layer is doing, at national scale, what most enterprises are still arguing about. The catch is the same one that runs through the whole sector: access is for participants in the air traffic system, not for the general public.
Industry: Aviation
