AR-0001 · Founding Draft · Version 0.2

Airspace Registry Charter

Every place deserves a machine-readable profile.

Preamble

Places have names, addresses, coordinates, and boundaries — but the people responsible for them have no open, standardized, machine-readable way to communicate how they would like those places treated by the technologies that increasingly interact with them: autonomous aircraft, robotics, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, mapping platforms, and autonomous vehicles.

AirspaceRegistry.org is an open registry for that missing layer of information.

At the heart of the registry: the Location Profile

At the heart of the registry is the Location Profile — the machine-readable record associated with a physical place. Operational preferences, activity categories, schedules, recurring time windows, temporary conditions, priority ordering, verification status, and contextual information are all fields within a single profile. As the ecosystem matures, additional profile types may emerge; the Location Profile is the first and foundational one.

Just as the Domain Name System publishes and resolves information about Internet resources, AirspaceRegistry.org seeks to become foundational infrastructure for publishing and discovering the metadata of physical ones.

Purpose

AirspaceRegistry.org is a free, community-driven registry where individuals, businesses, organizations, institutions, municipalities, and communities may publish a Location Profile for a real-world location. A profile may include:

operational preferences
activity categories
scheduling and recurring time windows
temporary conditions
priority / precedence ordering
verification status
contextual information
future metadata dimensions as spatial technologies evolve

It provides an open information layer that applications may voluntarily consider during planning, coordination, and interaction with physical places.

Guiding Principles

Those responsible for a place should have a voice.As technology increasingly interacts with locations, the owners, custodians, and communities responsible for them should be able to express how those interactions are preferred to occur. The registry facilitates communication — not control.

Metadata beats assumptions.Rather than requiring every application to independently guess how a place should be treated, the registry lets the people responsible for a place publish structured metadata that applications may voluntarily consider.

Open infrastructure benefits everyone.The registry encourages interoperability through open APIs, widely adopted standards, and transparent technical specifications wherever practical. Spatial infrastructure should become easier — not harder — to integrate.

Extensibility.The future cannot be fully anticipated. The registry is designed so that new metadata dimensions, technologies, industries, and use cases may be incorporated without fundamentally redesigning the registry. Extensibility is a core architectural principle.

Participation should remain broadly accessible.Basic community participation is intended to remain freely available. Commercial services should enhance participation, not replace it.

Privacy by design.The registry minimizes personal data, does not sell it, and does not publish a registrant’s personal contact information. Registrants control their own entries. A Location Profile describes a place, not a person.

The registry is informational.Registry information is voluntarily published metadata. It is not regulatory authority, legal notice, permission, ownership, aviation authorization, or operational approval. Applications remain responsible for interpreting registry information alongside applicable laws, regulations, and authoritative systems.

What the Registry Is

AirspaceRegistry.org is not simply a registry of drone preferences. It is an extensible registry of Location Profiles for places — a location’s profile may describe how its owner or custodian prefers it to be approached by present and future spatial technologies. Examples of what a profile might express:

Community AR experiences welcome.
Commercial AR by coordination.
Drone deliveries welcome on weekdays.
Prefers no recreational drones on Saturdays.
Drone-sensitive during scheduled events.
Rear loading dock preferred for robotic delivery.
Quiet hours after 9:00 PM.
Temporary construction activity present.
Prefers to prioritize public-safety and emergency operators.

The registry is designed to evolve by adding new metadata dimensions — not by redefining its underlying architecture.

Technical Philosophy

Any physical place should be describable through a structured, machine-readable Location Profile, and every application should be able to discover it through open standards and open APIs. The registry emphasizes:

interoperabilityGeoJSONOGC GeoPoseOpen AR Cloudstable place identifierstemporal contextverification transparencyextensibility

It complements existing mapping, GIS, aviation, property, navigation, and regulatory systems rather than replacing them. The exact fields and formats are specified in AR-1004 · the API Specification.

The Ecosystem

The registry sits within an ecosystem that separates four independent functions (detailed in the companion Ecosystem Architecture, AR-1000):

Intellectual Property	The underlying architectural innovations, which may be commercially licensed — funding and protecting the framework without controlling its content.
Commercial Implementations	Organizations that license the intellectual property to build products, services, registrars, APIs, and platforms. SpatialDNS LLC is one such commercial implementation — not the ecosystem itself.
Public Registry	AirspaceRegistry.org — neutral public infrastructure for publishing and discovering Location Profiles, with a free community registry as the common reference implementation.
Applications	Drones, AR, robotics, and mapping systems that independently decide how to interpret and apply published information.

Separating these functions keeps the registry neutral: commercial participation sustains the ecosystem, while the public registry remains broadly and freely accessible.

Relationship with SpatialDNS LLC

SpatialDNS LLC is the founding technology sponsor of AirspaceRegistry.org and one commercial implementation within the ecosystem. During the registry’s formative stages, it provides stewardship and support, funding, software development, infrastructure, technical operations, and ongoing innovation, and may develop commercial technologies, enterprise services, and registrar infrastructure that complement the community registry.

SpatialDNS develops and operates the software and services that currently support the registry, but does not determine the content of individual Location Profiles except where necessary to enforce published registry policies. The registry’s neutrality is a founding principle.

Where appropriate, SpatialDNS LLC may license patent-backed technologies that support registry functionality, while maintaining clear separation between intellectual-property ownership, commercial operations, and the registry itself.

Sustainability

Building shared digital infrastructure requires sustained investment. The registry’s long-term sustainability may be supported through commercial services, registrar participation, technology licensing, enterprise offerings, partnerships, sponsorships, and grants — all intended to fund continued investment in infrastructure, security, standards participation, operations, and innovation, while preserving free participation in the community registry.

Advisory Council

AirspaceRegistry.org intends to establish an independent, multidisciplinary Advisory Council representing expertise across aviation, drones, robotics, GIS, mapping, spatial computing, municipalities, real estate, standards organizations, public safety, privacy, insurance, artificial intelligence, and other relevant fields. Its purpose is to guide interoperability, encourage best practices, and provide diverse perspectives as the registry evolves. The Advisory Council advises the registry but does not govern it.

Long-Term Stewardship

AirspaceRegistry.org is currently established and operated through the stewardship and support of SpatialDNS LLC. As participation grows, the stewardship model may evolve to include broader participation from technical experts, industry organizations, authorized registrars, community representatives, and other stakeholders — while remaining faithful to the registry’s founding principles.

Closing Vision

The Internet connected information. The next generation of technology will increasingly interact with places. Anyone responsible for a place should be able to publish a structured Location Profile for it that emerging technologies can discover and voluntarily consider. AirspaceRegistry.org exists to help build that future.

Maps tell us where places are. Location Profiles help technology understand how to interact with them.

AR-0001 · Airspace Registry Charter