OGC Calls for Participation in its Next Major Innovation Testbed

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) invites interested organizations to respond to the Call for Participation (CFP) for OGC’s Testbed-16 Innovation Initiative. Responses are due February 9, 2020.

Testbed-16 will undertake research & development (R&D) in real-world environments to further advance technologies falling under the following 3 threads:

• Thread 1: Earth Observation Clouds (EOC)*
  • Earth Observation Application Packages with Jupyter Notebooks
  • Data Access and Processing API for Geospatial Data
  • Discrete Global Grid System
• Thread 2: Data Integration & Analytics (DIA)
• Aviation
• Machine Learning
• Full Motion Video to Moving Features
• Analysis Ready Data
• Data Centric Security
• Federated Security
• GeoPackage
• OpenAPI
• Thread 3: Modeling And Packaging (MAP)

* For useful background information on the EOC Architecture developed in OGC initiatives over the last 2 years, see the previously issued OGC Earth Observation Applications Pilot CFP.

OGC Testbeds are annual, fast-paced, multi-vendor, collaborative efforts to define, design, develop, and test candidate interface and encoding specifications. As an OGC Innovation Program activity, OGC Testbeds emphasize the evaluation of what should be in a specification, how the specification should act, and how specification-based software should respond. The draft specifications developed in Testbeds eventually move into the OGC Standards Program, where they are reviewed, revised, and potentially approved as new international open standards.

Each year, OGC Testbeds integrate requirements and ideas from a number of different sponsors. This pooling of ideas and requirements allows the leveraging of symbiotic effects and makes the overall initiative more attractive to both participants and sponsoring organizations. Work on Testbed-16 commenced with the elicitation of sponsor requirements in May of 2019.

The outcomes of Testbed-16 are expected to shape the future of geospatial software development and data publication. The Testbed sponsors are supporting this vision with cost-sharing funds to partially offset the costs associated with development, engineering, and demonstration of these outcomes. This offers selected participants a unique opportunity to recoup a portion of their initiative expenses.

Organizations selected to participate in Testbed-16 will develop prototype solutions based on the sponsors’ use cases, requirements, and scenarios. These are described in detail in the Testbed-16 CFP. Participants’ prototype solutions will implement existing OGC standards as well as new prototype interface and encoding specifications introduced or developed in Testbed-16. Prototype specifications may ultimately become official, member approved OGC standards, revisions to existing OGC standards, or best practices for using OGC standards.

OGC Testbeds are part of OGC's Innovation Program, a collaborative, agile, and hands-on prototyping and engineering environment where sponsors and OGC members come together to address location interoperability challenges while validating international open standards.