23 February 2016 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces that the Kickoff Event for six threads of the Testbed 12 Interoperability Initiative will be held at the USGS Headquarters in Reston, VA on Wednesday through Friday, March 2-4, the week before the OGC Technical Committee meeting in Washington, DC. The threads are sets of spatial interoperability requirements that will be addressed in the testbed to support the following:
- Command Center (CMD)
- Compliance (CMP)
- Consolidation (CNS)
- Field Operations (FO)
- Large-Scale Analytics (LSA)
- Linked Data and Advanced Semantics for Data Discovery and Dynamic Integration (LDS)
The Kickoff Event for a seventh thread, Aviation, took place in January 2016.
In OGC’s yearly testbeds, major sponsoring organizations work with leading technology providers to collaboratively define globally important spatial interoperability requirements that can be met through industry agreement on open standards and best practices. Testbed 12 Sponsors Include:
- DigitalGlobe, Inc. (DGI)
- European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation (EUROCONTROL)
- UK Defense Science and Technology Lab (UK-DSTL)
- US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
- US Geological Survey (USGS)
- US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
- US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)
Yearly OGC Testbeds are the principal activity of the OGC Interoperability Program and the main means by which the OGC membership, OGC’s testbed sponsors, and OGC’s partner standards organization have made spatial information an integral part of the world’s information infrastructure.
In a testbed’s planning phase, Sponsors and Participants define use cases and weave them into a scenario. Then the technology providers use a rapid prototyping process to develop and test candidate standards that enable successful and dramatic enactment of the scenario at the end of the testbed.
Shared investment in free and open spatial standards brings improved sharing and integration of spatial information, which has widespread and longstanding value for for society at large. Technology sponsors share the cost, for their organizations and for the benefit of society, of developing broadly useful interoperability innovations. Technology providers gain market exposure, market intelligence, and a chance to quickly take advantage of the business opportunities that arise with the introduction of new standards and associated technical capabilities.
At the March 2-4 Kickoff Event, Testbed 12 Sponsors and OGC Staff will present the interoperability requirements and objectives for the six Testbed 12 threads listed above. OGC Staff will introduce the technology provider organizations who have been selected to work with the sponsors. A summary of the Aviation Thread will also be provided.
After 8 months of development work, in November of this year participating technology providers will demonstrate successful interoperability in all of the use cases in a dramatic demonstration based on the scenario. These Participants will deliver completed OGC Engineering Reports for public review and deliberation in the OGC Standards Program. The reports will become Discussion Papers, candidate OGC standards, revisions to existing OGC standards, or best practices for using OGC standards and related standards from other standards development organizations.
The deadline for cost-sharing proposals in response to the RFQ has passed, but any organization interested in providing only in-kind support may continue to offer proposals up through the beginning of the Kickoff event. Details surrounding the Testbed 12 technology threads and the entire Testbed 12 Architecture can be found in Annex B of the RFQ and in the RFQ’s clarifications document.
Anybody wishing to learn more about this initiative, or about the OGC Interoperability Program in general, can contact Scott Serich, Director, Interoperability Programs (techdesk [at] opengeospatial.org) or visit www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/programs/ip.
The OGC® is an international geospatial standards consortium of more than 515 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website at
www.opengeospatial.org/.
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