Re: [SQL] Flight numbers data

O Scott Marlowe έγραψε στις Mar 29, 2006 :

> On Wed, 2006-03-29 at 02:17, Achilleus Mantzios wrote:
> > Hi, i am in the process of writing an application about
> > tickets, flights, etc, and i am thinking of getting the primitive
> > data ready at the begining and doing it the right way,
> > (e.g. the user will just select a flight number and doesnt
> > have to enter the airports, airport coordinates, countries,
> > airline name, airline code, departure/arrival times, etc...)
> >
> > I found some sources on the web about airlines (codes, names, countries,
> > etc...), also i found about airports, but nothing about flight numbers!
>
> That's cause companies that keep track of those things charge a LOT of
> money for their datasets.
>
> > This application will be for enterprise (internal) company use,
> > covering the flights of emploees around the world.
> >
> > I was just wondering how internet ticket agents manage to do it.
>
> They subscribe to some service that has this information in the back
> end. The data in that back end comes from the one or two sources of
> that data who charge yearly subscriptions in the hundreds of thousands
> of dollars.

Just to examine a little closer (bassically show my boss this!), can you
give me some pointers of some kind of web services providers
(in the broad sense) that sell such yearly subscriptions, for
internet travel agents?

>
> > Has anyone from the postgresql camp ever solved such a problem?
>
> Where I work, we're building a middle level system (look up the website
> that goes with my domain). And if we weren't in the airline reservation
> industry, we couldn't afford the data sets.
>
> > It is just that i wanna do it right, maybe play a little bit with AJAX
> > also who knows :)
>
> But "doing it right" goes against almost every tenet of the airline
> reservation industry :) haha. only serious.
>
> Seriously though, you might be able to get your travel agent or whoever
> you do reservations through to provide you with this information in some
> kind of reliable format for the tickets you've bought. If you can get
> some kind of automated feed from them, that would be the best way, if
> not, maybe they can email you the info each time, and you can cut and
> paste it in.
>
> There's much in the reservation industry that is basically a computer
> implementation of a 3x5 note card system. And none of those systems
> were originally built to talk to each other, so it's often impossible
> for a single user to get any kind of automatically created data from
> such an industry.

That was pretty much what i suspected, i have seen some
3270 type terminal emulators in some travel agents that
reminded me VSE/MVS/AS400/CICS and other beauties like that!!

Well, Scott your response was really helpful.
What i will do is just build the tables with airlines info,
airports info (IATA codes,etc..) with sources for the web.
Really are there any good sources out there for such info?
For airports i came across
http://www.partow.net/miscellaneous/airportdatabase/
it seems very complete but it misses new airports
(it doesnt have the new Greek one (IATA code ATH)which is some 5
years old).
Other sources i found is just HTML pages which is not so handy.

Then i would let the in-company tickets person build the flight numbers table
incrementally as she works.

What do you think?

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--
-Achilleus