Join with geospatial experts to solve your organization’s technology challenges and shape the future of location technologies

29 June 2020: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is currently preparing its next major Innovation Initiative, Testbed-17, which builds upon the success and outcomes of Testbed-15 and Testbed-16, and other IP initiatives. OGC is now inviting any potential sponsor organizations to bring forward their technology/integration challenges. Responses are due by September 1, 2020.

Challenges put forth by sponsoring organizations will be refined and mapped to a set of work items that OGC member organizations will apply to solve. The OGC Innovation Program team, together with the sponsors, will then select the most qualified organizations to join Testbed-17 and help solve these challenges.

In a collaborative effort, all Testbed participants, sponsors, and the OGC team work together to stepwise increase Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) for geospatial IT solutions, including software architecture, interface design, information & data models, and related standards and specifications. Testbed participants follow a rapid prototyping approach to design, develop, and test solutions to sponsors’ location-related problems.

OGC’s annual Testbeds are the Consortium’s largest Innovation Program (IP) initiatives. Testbeds boost research and development to make location data and information more FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable. Testbeds provide a unique opportunity for sponsors to tackle location data and processing challenges together with the world’s leading geospatial IT experts. Solutions developed in OGC Testbeds have gone on to form standards and technologies that now play critical roles in numerous domains across the world.

The technical scope of Testbed-17 is determined in a collaborative process between OGC staff and OGC sponsor organizations. Potentially fruitful technology areas for Testbed-17 to address include, but are not limited to:

• Geospatial Data Science and Analytics
• Spatial Data on the Web 
• Big Data processing, including datacubes, containerized applications, and exploitation platforms
• Aviation information management
• Analysis Ready Data: The “all-in” architecture that integrates the various technologies and current efforts available in OGC
• Tiling and Streaming: Optimized data access to 2D and 3D data

A longer list of further potential technology areas that could be addressed in Testbed-17 is available in the Call For Sponsors document.

If you are interested in sponsoring Testbed-17, OGC staff will help you develop detailed requirements, and will identify cross-sponsor synergies for you. Please see the issued Call For Sponsors for more information. Responses are due by September 1, 2020. 

Learn more about Testbed-17 at ogc.org/testbed17. To learn about the benefits of sponsoring an OGC IP Initiative such as Testbed-17, visit the OGC Innovation Program webpage.

About OGC
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of more than 500 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities driven to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
OGC’s member-driven consensus process creates royalty free, publicly available geospatial standards. Existing at the cutting edge, OGC actively analyzes and anticipates emerging tech trends, and runs an agile, collaborative Research and Development (R&D) lab that builds and tests innovative prototype solutions to members' use cases.
OGC members together form a global forum of experts and communities that use location to connect people with technology and improve decision-making at all levels. OGC is committed to creating a sustainable future for us, our children, and future generations.
Visit ogc.org for more info on our work.