SITA unveils trial to aid app development for airlines

SITA's research technology team, SITA Lab, has today unveiled a new trial for airlines and developers to work on a new application programming interface (API) developers' portal which the technology group is now moving into its next phase of development.

Called developer.aero the platform is being designed to enable airlines, airports and other industry players to extend existing IT processes by harnessing the application developer community to provide new apps for the industry and world travelers.

SITA’s chief technology officer, Jim Peters, CTO, announcing the trial at the 2012 Air Transport IT Summit in Brussels today, said: “API-client architecture is the key enabler that is driving new-gen app development and allowing apps to be developed for virtually any platform. Exposing data or processes through APIs allows developers to create features that will benefit everybody. It opens the possibility of solutions being created that the companies might not have the resources to develop or for which they might not have even anticipated a consumer need.

“In the airline industry, for example, allowing developers access to data on checked bags as they pass through various checkpoints on their journey, can power a useful API for self-service baggage tracing. This is just one area on which our team at SITA Lab is focusing,” he said.

If successful, this platform will open the door, in a secure and controlled manner, for application developers to access vast amounts of industry data enabling them to create applications for use on multiple devices, including mobiles and tablet

Peters continued: “We expect that our research will help promote innovation across the industry. Relationships with the developer community, both within and outside of the air transport industry, will be expanded and strengthened while the design of the portal will maintain control of data and infrastructure.”

SITA plans to have several APIs available on developer.aero. The first of these which SITA wants to trial with airlines is BagTrac. This API exposes data on the location of individual checked bags as they are scanned during the journey. As the leading IT provider to the air transport industry, SITA manages BagMessage which handles 1.2 billion bag messages every year. These include more than 400 million bag processing messages which give details of the exact location of a piece of luggage, for example, on a carousel at a particular airport or on the plane.