OGC calls for Sponsors of a major Innovation Initiative, Testbed 15

1 May 2018: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has issued a call for sponsors for its latest innovative interoperability initiative, Testbed 15.

Testbeds are OGC's largest initiatives, with last two testbeds averaging US $3 Million in sponsor funding. For example, Testbed 13 was sponsored by 12 organizations from 5 countries, and brought together more than 200 individuals from 60 organizations. Testbed 14 is OGC's 100th initiative and is currently in progress.

The OGC Innovation Program provides a venue to advance solutions for modeling, finding, accessing, analyzing, and visualizing geospatial data through using open standards. In addition to enhancing or extending standards, the testbeds provide a unique platform where sponsors work closely with many geospatial technology providers to rapidly generate prototypes and test environments to address mission-critical geospatial integration and interoperability requirements. Testbeds result in more than just new and updated standards: outcomes include guides, overviews, and best practices for solving critical geospatial interoperability problems.

Testbed 15 is an Innovation Program initiative. With previous initiatives, the OGC membership has helped develop new standards and architectures that have transformed how we share and use geospatial information, from advancing sharing of digital maps over the web (e.g. WMS) to new encodings (e.g. GeoPackage) that are empowering mobile users with powerful geospatial tools.

Building on the work from previous Testbeds, and looking at how to improve the sharing of geospatial information based on current technology trends, these are some preliminary areas that Testbed 15 may examine:

• Big Data Analytics
• Blockchain
• REST interfaces
• GeoPackage
• Workflows on hybrid cloud environments
• Containers
• GeoSemantics (Linked Data)
• Vector Tiles
• Security GeoHealth
• Smart Cities
• MapML
• Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS)
• Data Cubes
• Unmanned systems

More areas of interest can be found at OGC’s ideas repository on GitHub.

Sponsoring a testbed has great benefits:

• Sponsors advance solutions that can help the world and save lives (e.g. the world-wide use OGC standards in disaster management).
• Sponsors influence the technology, advancing standards and tools that will be available world-wide.
• Sponsors will get early insight into a particular technology or solution from a team of experts.
• Sponsors, as a pool, come together and can fund a more robust prototype (e.g. more servers and clients) while complementing their requirements with other sponsor's requirements.

For more information about how to join the upcoming sponsors meetings at the OGC June TC meeting in Fort Collins, or how to contribute ideas, please visit OGC’s Testbed 15 webpage