July 5, 2012 -- To support compliance testing, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) requests reference implementations for client software that implements the OGC Web Map Service (WMS) 1.3 Interface Standard. Development and testing of WMS 1.3 Reference Implementations will be coordinated and managed as part of the Compliance and Interoperability Testing & Evaluation (CITE) Thread in this year's major OGC Web Services Testbed Initiative (OWS-9). Funding is available to selected participants. To be considered for funding, interested parties are invited to submit a two-page proposal containing a description of their implementations and an estimate of their development/testing costs. Responses must be sent to Email Contact by August 5 to be considered for funding.

The OGC Compliance Program (CITE) provides the resources, procedures, and policies for improving software implementations' compliance with OGC standards. The Compliance Program provides an online free testing facility, a process for certification and branding of compliant products, and coordination of a vibrant community that develops and supports test scripts. Implementations that pass CITE tests are eligible to pay a Trademark License Fee to use the "Certified OGC Compliant" brand in packaging and marketing.

The WMS standard provides an interface for requesting geo-registered map images from one or more distributed geospatial databases. A WMS request defines the geographic layer(s) and area of interest to be processed. The response to the request is one or more geo-registered map images (returned as JPEG, PNG, etc.) that can be displayed in a browser application. The interface also supports the ability to specify whether the returned images should be transparent so that layers from multiple servers can be combined or not.

Development of abstract and executable test suites (ETS) for WMS 1.3 clients is underway as part of the OWS-9 initiative. A beta test is available at the CITE Beta website. The current draft of the WMS test suite is available at the OGC SVN repository.

OGC Members with WMS 1.3 client implementations are invited to become WMS CITE Initiative sponsors by making these resources available for free for "black box" testing. The implementation will be tested between July and December of 2012. Tests and reference implementations are to be completed by December of 2012. The first three implementations to pass 100% of the testing process during the release candidate phase will have their Trademark License Fee waived for their first complete annual licensing period.

For more information about this opportunity, please contact: Luis Bermudez, OGC Director of Interoperability Certification, Email Contact.

The OGC(R) is an international consortium of more than 450 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact/.