Open Science has become a rallying cry for the modern research community—and for good reason. It represents a powerful shift away from closed, fragmented, and often redundant scientific practice, toward something more collaborative, transparent, and ultimately more effective. At its heart, Open Science is about giving others—not just peers, but policymakers, agencies, and developers—the ability to access, understand, and build on your work. But as anyone who has tried to put it into practice knows, Open Science is also hard. The challenges are well known: incompatible formats, data locked in silos, undocumented code, untraceable outputs, and the very real time investment required to make scientific work reproducible and usable by others. What’s been missing is a system—a tested, standards-based framework that turns good intentions into operational reality. That’s what the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Open Science Persistent Demonstrator (OSPD) is designed to deliver.
A Standards-Based Demonstrator for Real-World Reuse
The OSPD tackles Open Science’s core challenges head-on. Built around OGC’s decades of expertise in geospatial standards, the demonstrator shows what it means to not just publish science—but operationalize it. Through the adoption of OGC standards, OSPD provides an interoperable foundation that mitigates data silos, supports reuse of scientific applications and algorithms, and enables seamless integration across cloud environments and institutional systems. This isn’t theoretical. The demonstrator has successfully shown how research published in scientific journals can be directly linked to applications running on cloud platforms, with minimal overhead for scientists. Because every application is described in a standardized way, others can pick it up, understand it, and put it to use—whether they’re tweaking the area of interest, changing the season, or adjusting the output visualization. All of this is documented in the final OSPD report, and further explained in this short video overview of OSPD.
From Concept to Practice: Use Cases That Show the System Works
Of course, the value of a system is measured in what it enables. The OSPD isn’t just a framework—it’s a living, working lab of real-world use cases. And these are not cherry-picked. They are representative of the kinds of interdisciplinary, geospatially rooted challenges Open Science must address to remain relevant in a world shaped by climate volatility, rapid urbanization, and environmental degradation.
Wildfire Risk Assessment and Planning
Wildfires no longer follow predictable seasonal patterns. As extreme events become the norm, governments and communities are searching for better tools to anticipate risk and allocate resources. OSPD enables workflows that:
- Integrate Earth Observation data, topographic information, and vegetation indices
- Assess fire vulnerability in near-real time
- Generate regional risk maps using configurable parameters
- Reuse the same approach across geographies and time windows
These tools don’t require users to be fire scientists or software engineers. They simply need access to the workflow—and trust in the science behind it.
Harmful Algal Bloom Monitoring
Toxic algal blooms disrupt ecosystems, harm human health, and devastate coastal economies. Yet the tools to monitor and predict them often remain siloed within research institutions. Through OSPD, workflows have been developed to:
- Fuse satellite data (e.g., chlorophyll and Sea Surface Temperature, SST) with local observations
- Identify early-stage bloom formation
- Offer modular, adaptable models that can be rerun with new inputs
- Deliver outputs in formats accessible to coastal managers and public health officials
This is science in service of the communities who need it most.
Drought and Water Resource Management
Droughts move slowly, but their impacts accumulate fast—especially where agriculture and freshwater supply are under strain. OSPD supports workflows that:
- Combine EO data, vegetation health indices, and climate forecasts
- Model water scarcity risks across time and space
- Adapt easily to local hydrological and land use conditions
- Help water managers shift from reactive to proactive planning
Instead of relying on bespoke systems or proprietary tools, researchers can reuse and adapt trusted workflows—saving time and improving coordination.
Urban Heat Island (UHI) Analysis
The urban heat island effect exacerbates inequality, endangers lives, and increasingly demands a geospatial response. OSPD’s UHI workflows allow users to:
- Map temperature variation using EO data
- Overlay socioeconomic or land-use information to assess vulnerability
- Model the impact of mitigation strategies (e.g., tree planting, green roofs)
- Transfer workflows across cities for rapid adoption
This enables urban planners, NGOs, and researchers to prioritize interventions with data-backed insights.
Deforestation and Land Use Monitoring
Monitoring forest loss isn’t new—but doing it openly, reproducibly, and across borders is. With OSPD, workflows can:
- Detect land cover changes using multi-temporal EO analysis
- Flag deforestation in protected or high-risk zones
- Provide reproducible outputs suitable for enforcement or policy reports
- Encourage alignment across agencies and organizations
These workflows are not just technically sound—they’re politically and socially useful, designed for collaboration and accountability.
A System Built for Discoverability, Reproducibility, and Trust
The value of OSPD lies in how it brings the pieces together. At its heart, the project is about connecting the essential elements of Open Science:
- Data, models, and documentation
- Applications and examples
- Learning materials that support adoption and experimentation
- Platforms that serve the data and provide the necessary computing resources
- A knowledge graph that links it all
Every application in the OSPD ecosystem includes:
- A standardized metadata description of what it needs and how it runs
- Documentation of its configuration, provenance, and input data
- Guidance for re-deployment across other platforms or locations
The result is a repeatable, remixable scientific asset—not just a one-off result.
Open Science and the Challenge of AI
In a world where AI systems increasingly inform policy, response, and prediction, trust in inputs has become non-negotiable. Explainability, especially in deep neural networks, remains a major scientific and philosophical hurdle. But trust doesn’t always have to start with the algorithm. It can start upstream—with the data, the workflows, and the people behind them. OSPD contributes to this trust by enabling the creation and registration of well-tested, traceable processing units. These workflows produce data that is reproducible and explainable, even when consumed by black-box systems. This is what some call “individual trust in AI”—a trust grounded in the confidence that the inputs are sound, even when the model is opaque.
Why It Matters
In today’s high-stakes environment—where scientific evidence guides emergency response, public investment, and international agreements—the integrity of data and methods isn’t just a technical concern. It’s a matter of public trust, policy effectiveness, and societal resilience. OSPD’s approach ensures that governments can make decisions based on workflows that are not only scientifically rigorous, but also transparent and verifiable. It helps researchers contribute to systems that scale beyond academia. And it allows communities to benefit from scientific progress that’s built for reuse, not just publication. Open Science, powered by initiatives like OSPD, is how we make geospatial intelligence accessible, actionable, and accountable.
What Comes Next
The future of OSPD is about scale, sustainability, and inclusion. The demonstrator has already proven what’s possible—now the task is to grow the ecosystem. Priorities include:
- Expanding the contributor network—to include more scientists, developers, and practitioners
- Improving cloud-native delivery for cost-efficiency and scalability
- Harmonizing data sources to streamline cross-platform reuse
- Strengthening the community of practice through learning, outreach, and engagement
The vision is clear: Open Science not as an ideal, but as an operational, trustworthy, and collaborative system.
Acknowledging Our Partners
The progress and impact of the Open Science Persistent Demonstrator would not have been possible without the vision and support of our partners at NASA and ESA. Their commitment to advancing open, reusable, and interoperable science has helped turn the promise of Open Science into real-world capability. By investing in initiatives like OSPD, they are not only enabling better research—they’re accelerating the infrastructure of trust and transparency that global collaboration depends on.
A Living Lab, Open to All
The OGC Open Science Persistent Demonstrator is more than a proof of concept—it’s a growing, shared space where standards meet action, and science becomes something others can use, trust, and build on. Whether you’re a researcher, planner, developer, or policymaker, there’s a place for you in this community. Explore the workflows. Try the tools. Share your expertise. Join the effort to make Open Science truly open, and truly impactful.
Contact us today to get involved – there will be another call for contributions soon.
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Join us at OGC’s Sea to Space Innovation Summit in Mérida, Mexico, June 9–12, 2025, where this conversation continues. Government officials may attend at no cost.
About This Series
This article is the third in our “10 Ideas in 10 Weeks” series, highlighting bold ideas and real-world innovation across the OGC community. If you missed the first post—Navigating the Era of Synthetic Imagery: Why Trust in Geospatial Data Matters)—you can read it here. The second post—From Data to Decisions: Aligning for the Space Economy—explores how we can prepare for a more connected, competitive, and collaborative future in orbit. You can read it here.