OGC publishes Testbed 13 Engineering Reports

7 March 2018: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has released 24 Engineering Reports, created from the research undertaken during its Testbed 13 initiative.

The Engineering Reports document interoperability prototypes developed by Testbed 13’s participating technology providers, and describe work-in-progress on potential new OGC standards, as well as work done to validate candidate standards or improve existing OGC standards. While OGC Engineering Reports are not standards, the information they contain is intended to be useful to developers and implementers of OGC standards.

The Engineering Reports developed from Testbed 13 focus on:

• Dynamic Support Integration
• Earth Observations and Cloud Computing
• 3D Performance, CDB, and vector tiles
• Cross Community Interoperability
• Compliance testing

In OGC’s annual testbeds, major sponsoring organisations put forth geospatial IT problems. OGC staff integrate these requirements into a set of software architectures, and technology providers then receive support and funding to collaboratively research and rapidly develop prototype solutions. Eventually, the results are handed over to the OGC Standards Program where they take the form of consensus-based open standards and best practices.

OGC Testbeds are a key activity of the OGC Innovation Program, and the main means by which the OGC membership, OGC’s testbed sponsors, and OGC’s partner standards organisations have made spatial information an integral part of the world’s information infrastructure.

Testbed 13 took the requirements of 12 sponsors, and, over the course of 9 months, 31 different participant organizations created solutions to 85 work items - which formed the core content of the Testbed 13 demonstration event held in December, and which are now documented in the newly released Engineering Reports.