Federated Maritime Spatial Data Infrastructure (FMSDI) Phase 6 Pilot

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Federated Maritime Spatial Data Infrastructure (FMSDI) Pilot is advancing the interoperability, accessibility, and operational use of marine geospatial information through open standards and collaborative innovation. Building on the outcomes of five previous pilot phases, FMSDI Phase 6 marks the next stage in this work by validating best practices for federated maritime data sharing in complex operational environments. The Pilot focuses on dynamic data exchange, multi-domain access, metadata and semantic interoperability, and decision-making in data-constrained environments, using the Arctic as a representative application context that concentrates many of the most demanding challenges facing the global maritime geospatial community.

OGC Pilots are proofs of concept and minimum viable initiatives: typically three to six months in duration, demonstrating concepts, specifications, and emerging standards in real-world operational settings. OGC Pilot projects test what works—and what doesn’t. Building on five previous FMSDI phases, Phase 6 marks a deliberate progression from documenting Good Practices toward validating Best Practices in operationally realistic maritime scenarios.

Why This Project Matters

FMSDIs have advanced significantly through five previous pilot phases, demonstrating the value of standards-based interoperability across land–sea domains, regions, and stakeholder communities. However, several persistent challenges continue to limit the ability of FMSDIs to operate effectively at scale, including:

• Sharing dynamic, real-time maritime information
• Enabling secure, multi-domain access across policy and classification boundaries
• Reconciling divergent metadata approaches across communities
• Bridging data gaps at the land-sea interface
• Operating in environments where trusted data access is incomplete or contested

These challenges are global in nature, affecting the evolution, maturity, and operational impact of FMSDIs worldwide.

A major focus of FMSDI Phase 6 is the Arctic, which serves as a representative application context because it concentrates many of these challenges: rapidly changing environmental conditions, dynamic and uncertain data, uneven access to authoritative information, and the need to support decision-making across multiple communities and domains.

In line with priorities surfaced through the OGC Marine Domain Working Group (DWG) and the UN-GGIM/IHO Joint Working Group on Marine Geospatial Information (JWGMGI), the emphasis is not only on interoperability, but also on advancing decision-ready information, trust, and scalable implementation approaches.

Pilot Objective

FMSDI Phase 6 will advance FMSDIs by demonstrating how open, standards-based approaches can enable:

• Exchange of dynamic maritime data with varying levels of confidence and timeliness
• Secure, policy-aware multi-domain access to content and derived products
• Interoperability across heterogeneous metadata regimes and semantic models
• Effective decision support in contexts with partial, uncertain, or contested data availability
• Progression from Good Practices to Best Practices through implementation, testing, and validation in complex operational scenarios

The Pilot will produce validated architectures, prototype implementations, and actionable recommendations to inform future FMSDI development, standards evolution, and implementation guidance.

Key Challenge Areas

A consistent theme across these challenges is the need to move from basic interoperability toward decision-ready information — requiring explicit consideration of data quality, provenance, fitness for purpose, and trust in both source data and derived products.

Dynamic Maritime Information

Maritime data in the Arctic is continuously evolving — for example ice coverage, navigability, and environmental conditions. It is derived from diverse observational and modeled sources, and is associated with varying levels of confidence, quality, and timeliness.

Key challenge: How can FMSDIs represent, exchange, and operationalize dynamic data while explicitly addressing uncertainty, timeliness, provenance, and fitness for purpose?

Multi-Domain Access and Classification

Maritime operations span civil, scientific, operational, and defense communities, with diverse policy, classification, releasability, and access constraints.

Key challenge: How can federated access be enabled across domains while respecting security requirements, data-sharing agreements, and trust frameworks, including the treatment of derived products as information moves up the value chain?

Metadata and Semantic Interoperability

Stakeholder communities apply different metadata and semantic approaches: lightweight, flexible approaches for rapid sharing and practical use; more robust, structured approaches for governance, traceability, and formal exchange; and domain-specific vocabularies, profiles, and registries that do not align cleanly.

Key challenge: How can FMSDIs support interoperability across differing metadata philosophies without requiring convergence on a single model? This includes structural and semantic interoperability through machine-readable shared vocabularies and stronger alignment between mechanisms such as the OGC Definition Server, the IHO Geospatial Information Registry, and related data quality registries.

Limited or Contested Data Availability

Sometimes referred to as gaps at the land-sea interface, or the “Russia problem” in the Arctic context: access to authoritative data is uneven across regions, territorial claims and coverage may be contested, and some datasets may be inaccessible, unavailable, or insufficiently trusted.

Key challenge: How can FMSDIs support decision-making in data-limited environments, integrate multiple representations with differing trust levels, and maintain operational resilience when trusted data cannot be assumed? While this challenge has an Arctic-specific dimension, it also serves as a representative case for broader global conditions in which access to trusted geospatial data is restricted or uncertain.

Arctic Application Context

The Arctic introduces complex challenges for maritime decision-making, including rapidly changing environmental conditions, the characterization of different ice types, the absence of a single authoritative definition of ice boundaries, and the limited utility of static datasets in highly dynamic conditions.

FMSDI Phase 6 will explore approaches such as:

• Representing navigability in terms of “where ice is not present,” rather than relying solely on fixed borders or single depictions of ice edges
• Supporting multiple concurrent representations of environmental conditions where different methods or research groups produce different results
• Incorporating confidence, provenance, and timeliness into how navigability and other indicators are presented and interpreted
• Demonstrating decision-making approaches in the presence of uncertainty and disagreement between data sources

The “white ribbon” challenge — the persistent gap between land and marine data at the interface — remains an important unifying context in which many of these issues converge, especially in coastal and Arctic environments.

Alignment with International Marine Geospatial Priorities

FMSDI Phase 6 aligns with priorities surfaced through the OGC Marine DWG and the JWGMGI, including:

• Progressing from Good Practices to Best Practices for Federated Marine Spatial Data Infrastructures
• Capacity building and “leveling the playing field” across marine data collection, integration, and use
• Improving metadata consistency across all marine data, not only S-100 or traditional GIS content
• Advancing mapping of the land–sea interface, a common priority across countries and organizations
• Supporting adaptation to emerging technologies, including AI-enabled analysis and workflows

The Pilot also responds to the broader observation that the marine community faces the same challenge as the wider geospatial community: how to bridge different metadata models and profiles without requiring every participant to transform their metadata into a single standard representation.

Proposed Workstreams

The following workstreams translate the Pilot’s core challenge areas into concrete, testable activities. As with all OGC Pilots, sponsors directly shape and refine this scope; new sponsors are invited to add to or adjust the workstreams below.

1. Dynamic Data Exchange, Uncertainty, and Fitness for Purpose

• Define models for representing confidence, timeliness, provenance, and uncertainty in maritime observations, forecasts, and derived indicators.
• Implement standards-based, API-driven access to dynamic data streams such as ice, weather, vessel movement, and related environmental observations. This work will be coordinated with OGC Testbed-22 Theme 2 (EDR API Enhancement), with FMSDI Phase 6 serving as a maritime operational validation environment for those outputs.
• Develop fitness-for-purpose indicators to help users understand how data and products may be used in different operational contexts.
• Demonstrate visualization and analytic approaches that communicate temporal state, confidence, and variation across sources.

2. Multi-Domain Access, Policy Enforcement, and Trust

• Prototype policy-aware access mechanisms across civil, scientific, operational, and defense domains.
• Test federated identity, access control, filtering, and information-release approaches within standards-based architectures.
• Evaluate trust frameworks for cross-domain data sharing and use of derived products.
• Explore how integrity, provenance, and trust can be preserved as information moves from raw observations toward decision-ready indicators.

3. Metadata and Semantic Interoperability

• Compare lightweight and robust metadata approaches used by participating stakeholders.
• Develop mappings, bridging mechanisms, or profile strategies that allow interoperable use without requiring wholesale metadata transformation.
• Incorporate semantic interoperability through shared vocabularies and machine-readable definitions across domains.
• Explore practical alignment between mechanisms such as the OGC Definition Server, the IHO Geospatial Information Registry, and related data-quality resources. This work will be coordinated with OGC Testbed-22 Theme 7 (Metadata Interoperability), which is advancing related standards work with the same IHO/UN-GGIM JWGMGI community.
• Assess whether OGC API – Environmental Data Retrieval (EDR) adds value in data-use and analytic workflows involving data cubes and arbitrary extraction of information.

4. Operating Under Limited or Contested Data Conditions

• Develop approaches for integrating authoritative and non-authoritative data sources in environments where coverage is incomplete or access is constrained.
• Represent and manage conflicting spatial assertions, including differences in boundaries, coverage, and other spatial interpretations.
• Explore decision-support strategies when information is incomplete, unavailable, or uncertainly trusted.
• Use the Arctic “Russia problem” as a concrete case for a broader class of global challenges involving restricted access to trusted geospatial data.

5. Arctic Navigability and the Land-Sea Interface

• Implement scenario-based workflows focused on navigation and situational awareness in ice-affected waters.
• Explore approaches that define navigability through the absence of ice as well as through competing depictions of ice extent and condition.
• Support multiple concurrent interpretations of environmental conditions and demonstrate how they can be compared and operationalized.
• Demonstrate end-to-end situational awareness across participating systems at the land–sea interface, including implications for safety, infrastructure, and operations.

6. Capacity Building and Implementation Pathways

• Identify practical barriers to adoption of FMSDI best practices across regions and organizations with different levels of maturity.
• Develop implementation guidance, training concepts, and reference approaches suitable for differing regional, environmental, and budgetary conditions.
• Support broader understanding of relevant standards and profiles across participating communities.
• Capture lessons that can help “level the playing field” and accelerate broader uptake of validated Best Practices.

Coordination with Related OGC Initiatives

FMSDI Phase 6 complements other OGC Innovation Program initiatives while maintaining a distinct operational focus.

Workstreams 1 and 3 intersect with planned concurrent OGC project activity, particularly OGC Testbed-22 Theme 2 (EDR API Enhancement) and Theme 7 (Metadata Interoperability), both of which engage the same IHO/UN-GGIM JWGMGI community on marine metadata and EDR API topics. While Testbed-22 advances the underlying standards and technical tooling, FMSDI Phase 6 applies and validates those outputs in operational maritime scenarios, with findings expected to inform future Testbed iterations.

Program coordination will also be maintained with the Trusted Data Systems Testbed where applicable outputs on metadata modernization and API-driven access apply across both terrestrial and maritime data ecosystems.

Expected Outcomes

Operational Demonstrations

• Scenarios illustrating dynamic, multi-domain maritime data integration
• Arctic-focused use cases supporting navigability, situational awareness, and decision-making under uncertainty

Engineering and Best-Practice Outputs

• An FMSDI Engineering Report documenting architecture, findings, lessons learned, and recommendations
• Identification of standards gaps and areas for enhancement
• Recommendations to OGC, IHO, and associated communities on pathways from Good Practices to Best Practices

Strategic Impact

• Advancement of FMSDI maturity
• Practical implementation guidance for governments, industry, and other stakeholders
• Stronger interoperability, trust, and implementation readiness across the global maritime geospatial ecosystem

Participation

Organizations participating in FMSDI Phase 6 will have the opportunity to influence the evolution of FMSDI and related standards and Best Practices; gain early insight into emerging approaches for dynamic data exchange, trust, semantic interoperability, and implementation; demonstrate leadership in addressing complex maritime geospatial challenges with Arctic and global relevance; and collaborate with an international network of FMSDI, IHO, JWGMGI, and related stakeholders.

As with all OGC Pilot initiatives, funding supports participants’ research and development activities while showcasing innovation and capability. OGC handles the procurement complexity of translating sponsor requirements into specific work items and managing participant contracts, so organizations of all sizes can contribute — and participation in this Pilot does not preclude pursuing larger follow-on work.

Learn More

A separate Call for Sponsors is now available for organizations interested in helping shape FMSDI Phase 6. The Call outlines sponsorship opportunities, participation benefits, and the process for getting involved.

For more information about the Pilot, previous FMSDI phases, and opportunities to participate, visit the related FMSDI resources and the current Call for Sponsors.