Glossary

NDC (New Distribution Capability) — IATA's XML-based standard for airline distribution and retailing, enabling rich offers and orders directly between airlines and sellers.

Offer — what an airline is willing to sell and at what price, made up of one or more offer items. Time-bounded.

Offer item — a sellable unit within an offer (a flight, a bag, a seat…), priced and orderable.

Order — what a customer has actually bought. Created from offer items; the authoritative view is OrderViewRS.

Order item — a unit of an order, mapping to the offer item that was purchased.

Service — an à-la-carte item (bag, seat, meal, lounge…) offered via ServiceListRS and delivered/serviced via the Servicing & Delivery messages.

RQ / RS — request / response. NDC messages come in …RQ and …RS pairs (with some notification-only messages).

Notification (Notif) — a one-way, push message (e.g. OrderChangeNotifRQ) typically answered with an IATA_Acknowledgement.

DistributionChain — the ordered list of participants in a transaction, each a DistributionChainLink with an OrgRole.

OrgRole — a participant's role in the chain: Seller, Aggregator, or Carrier.

POS (Point of Sale) — the selling context: country, agency, and channel.

PayloadAttributes — message metadata: version, correlation, and timestamps.

AugmentationPoint — the standard xs:any extension slot for bilaterally-agreed data; always optional.

Acknowledgement — the generic IATA_Acknowledgement envelope for receipts and for errors/warnings when a typed response doesn't apply.

Error / Warning — in-band problem reporting. An Error means the request failed; a Warning accompanies a successful result.

Payment Clearance — the settlement-layer message family (IATA 2022.1 namespace) for clearing and reconciling payments between participants.

Reshop — requesting priced change options for an existing order (OrderReshopRQ → OrderReshopRS) before committing with OrderChangeRQ.

xmldsig — W3C XML Digital Signature, optionally carried in a message's Signature element.

elementFormDefault="qualified" — the XSD setting that makes every element namespace-qualified, which is why nested elements re-declare a default namespace in the examples.