ONE Record pilots for data sharing
Henk Mulder, Head of Digital Cargo at IATA
Last week we held the 6th ONE Record Task Force meeting at the IATA conference center in Geneva and for the first time we had all the companies that are piloting this new data sharing standard in one place together.
ONE Record was endorsed last month by the Cargo Service Conference at its 2019 meeting in Singapore at the World Cargo Symposium. ONE Record is a specification for data sharing of air cargo data for airlines, forwarders, shippers and all of their transport and logistics partners. It specifies how data is shared using a common API spec but it also governs the data that is exchanged in JSON LD format. The "LD" is short for Linked Data and that indicates two important features.
ONE Record aims to achieve, global access and transparency in cargo transport and logistics
Firstly, data is left at its source and documents and systems can link to it using URL's rather than copy the actual data. This is common practice on the web but in B2B air cargo it's a novelty. The second point about JSON LD is that is an RDF format, short for Resource Description Framework. That means that data can have 'object oriented' classes which can be nested and reused. In practice that means very short document definitions without duplication of information. This topic deserves a series of posts on its own!
The last element of the ONE Record specification concerns security, i.e. ensuring that only the true recipient of your data can actually access it. We are currently testing an architecture with identity and authentication providers through public-private keys and tokens and authorization managed at server level, i.e. the ONE Record nodes.
At our meeting last week we put all the ONE Record pilots on a slide as shown above. The fact that these look like constellations is a nice illustration of what ONE Record is creating. Each constellation includes several transport partners, such as a shipper, a forwarder and an airline. There are also cargo community systems and ground handlers as well as road transport and customs are also included.
These companies have become the founding nodes of the Internet of Logistics.
Once these pilots are ready - and at least one of them is, others will be in months - we will connect these constellations together into a global cargo information network that we refer to as the Internet of Logistics. Although each pilot constellation has only a handful of connections, once you put them together, you get 210 meaningful connections in transport and logistics. In fact, if the community systems in the pilot would open up access to their customers, that number shoots up to a potential of 77 million. This sums up nicely what ONE Record aims to achieve, global access and transparency in cargo transport and logistics.
A few more companies are being added shortly and congratulations to all these companies who are putting their resources into these pilots and with that have become the founding nodes of the Internet of Logistics.