Contrail: Building an ATproto lexicon for aviation

I recently returned from a mostly offline trip and was catching up on some digital tinkering when I decided to add AT Protocol publishing to this blog and subsequently fell down a bit of a rabbit hole.

As someone who’s been extremely online since I was around eleven, I’ve always been interested in protocols and digital infra but but the eras of corporate platform consolidation and Web3/crypto bullshit has made it hard to get excited about that stuff for awhile. AT Protocol honestly feels like the first truly exciting thing in this space for quite some time and I wound up searching for a project to play around in the space.

What I landed on is putting together a (proposed) lexicon specific to aviation. I’m calling it Contrail and the intent is that it can serve as a general purpose framework for describing flights of any kind with very few required fields and a ton of optional ones to capture the breadth of aviation operations out there.

There’s a whole site with all the details at https://contrail.airplaneian.com/ but to offer some brief background here, AT Protocol lexicons are a schema language to describe different types of atproto records. I was thinking that similar to how standard.site offers lexicons for articles and blog posts which then allows others to build interesting apps and features based on that structure, it would be cool to have a foundational lexicon for aviation webapps that use AT Protocol.

A lexicon with no associated webapp is pretty boring so I also put together a very simple demo that reads a CSV export from Flighty Pro and allows you to select one or more flights to publish to your atproto PDS as a flight record. Now obviously scrobbling your flight history has some, uh, privacy concerns (and Contrail is very much not intended to be limited to this use case!) but it’s a very simple example of building a thing based on the lexicons.

I have some other, more complex, ideas that I’d like to build in the near future that are less problematic and a lot more interesting and I hope to share them soon! I also think there are a lot of opportunities to expand on this with complimentary lexicons and other resources using different AT Protocol features.