Please note that this Galileo is absolutely not related to Java.
Galileo is basically a set of web services which can be used to book airline tickets. Originally, it was supposed to be used via Galileo Desktop, whereby operators would enter various commands to perform required operations. For example,
SA*AZ610J20JULFCOJFK
will "Display seat availability map for specified flight and class".
Granted, humans can get used to it and be very efficient, but here comes a problem of integrating this with other systems. For that, folks at TravelPort basically slapped a SOAP interface to this system (which must have been written in COBOL or something), without even thinking about actually embracing XML. For example, it can contain
<Ind1>N</Ind1>
<Ind2>N</Ind2>
<Ind3>N</Ind3>
...
<Ind72>N</Ind72> <!-- Yes! 72! -->
or, better yet
<Text>P/RU/4xxx24528/RU/11MAY67/M/23DEC12/AxxxxxxV/MxxxM</Text>
This is called "Galileo's Proprietary Structured Data".
In light of this, my question is as follows: are there any sane airline tickets booking systems we can integrate with? Or are there companies which have products that can abstract away all this insanity?