10 July 2014 -- For more than a decade the OGC Interoperability Program has used an agile testbed-based development process to deliver open standards for communicating spatial information of all kinds.  The OGC is now planning OGC Testbed 11. You are invited to bring your organization’s spatial information communication requirements to this innovative process for making “where” data move easily through workflows.

The next Sponsors Planning meeting for OGC Testbed 11 is planned for 1100 EDT US on 16 July 2014. It will be held via GoToMeeting. Join the Sponsors Planning meeting at this link: https://www4.gotomeeting.com/join/592252439. Use your microphone and speakers (VoIP). A headset is recommended. Or, call in via telephone by calling one of the phone numbers provided during connection to the meeting.

Discussion among prospective Testbed 11 sponsors has been underway for several months to collect ideas and firm up requirements. This phase of the process is nearing an end, but there is still time to get involved as a sponsor. We want to know about spatial communication use cases that are important in your organization! So far, use cases have been identified in the areas outlined below:

Threads and Themes being considered:

• Urban Resilience, Smart Cities, IoT
• Climate Resilience / Big Data processing and analysis
• Aviation Information Exchange and Security

Those Threads and Themes address spatial information requirements in use cases that involve:

• Cloud computing/performance and Security
• Provenance - query and data optimization
• Semantically enabled OGC Web Services. Examples:
  • Gazetteers using Linked Data and GeoSPARQL
  • Mediation and Linked Data
• Digital Weather service and data delivery (e.g. using using the OGC Web Coverage Service Interface standard in delivering WXXM-encoded weather data)
• JSON / GeoJSON / JSON-LD
• REST/SOAP (consistent use across OGC WMS, WFS, WCS, WMTS)
• GeoPackage and GeoSynchronization, including possible extensions for additional output formats
• Symbology Management and Mediation (e.g., Law Enforcement, public safety, etc.)
• New or enhanced OGC Compliance tests

In OGC testbeds, sponsors set requirements and share in funding the testbeds. Participants are technology providers who prototype candidate standards and best practices and who find and address problems with existing and candidate standards and product implementations of standards.

OGC testbed sponsors benefit in many ways. A sponsor’s share of the cost of an industry-wide integration effort is a small fraction of what the sponsor would pay for an isolated integration effort. Vendors contribute because of what they gain in exposure, market intelligence, market expansion, and contact with customers: Previous government, private sector and NGO sponsor investment in OGC testbeds has leveraged in-kind participant investment that is typically worth 3 times the sponsor investment. Participants' investments to date total over $100 million. Testbeds produce standards and best practices; working, interoperable and commercially available technologies and products; and solid evidence of the availability and practicality of operational systems based on open standards. These testbed results have immeasurable social and economic value as a foundation for innovation and market development. The value of OGC testbed sponsors' and participants' investment in standards development is further leveraged by the OGC's close coordination with other standards organizations.

If you are a prospective participant, keep an eye out here for news about the release of the OGC Testbed 11 Request for Quotation/Call for Participation (RFQ/CFP), planned for October 2014. Official announcement and information on how to participate will be published on the OGC website here: http://www.opengeospatial.org/pressroom/pressreleases.

These are the near-term Testbed 11 planning milestones:

• Mid-July - Next Sponsor Planning Meeting (16 July 2014)
• July - August 2014 - Finalize Requirements and Sponsors’ commitments
• September 2014 - Finalize Sponsor agreements
• October 2014 (early) - Release RFQ/CFP
• January 2015 - Kickoff - Begin Testbed 11 development phase

If you have community or mission requirements that you would like to see addressed or if you have questions or want additional information, send email to OGC Director Interoperability Programs Lew Leinenweber Email Contact.

The OGC™ is an international consortium of more than 475 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.

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