OGC Testbed-19

For more information please contact innovation@ogc.org

Call for Participation is open: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has issued the Call for Participation (CFP) for OGC Testbed-19; the PDF version can be found here. Funding is available, and responses are due by April 11, 2023, @11:59 PM AoE. For proposal submissions, please follow this link.

Update: On several requests to prepare responses around the Easter holidays, the proposal deadline has been extended to April 11, 2023, @11:59 PM AoE.

Testbed-19: Interoperability and Collaboration from Oceans to Space

Overview and Benefits

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) invites interested organizations to respond to the Call for Participation (CFP) for OGC’s Testbed-19 Collaborative Solutions and Innovation (COSI) Initiative. Testbed-19 is a collaborative effort to rapidly prototype, design, develop and test solutions to location-related problems. Funded participation is available. A Bidders Q&A Webinar will occur on March 8, 2023 from 10am-11am EST.

The Testbed-19 initiative will explore 6 tasks, including Geospatial in Space, Machine Learning: Transfer Learning, Geodatacubes, Analysis Ready Data, Agile Reference Architecture, and High Performance Computing.

Testbed-19 provides an outstanding opportunity to engage with and lead the latest research on geospatial system design, concept development, and rapid prototyping. The Initiative provides a business opportunity for stakeholders to mutually define, refine, and evolve service interfaces and protocols in the context of hands-on experience and feedback. By participating in Testbed-19, you will shape the future of geospatial software development and data publication.

Testbed-19 offers selected Participants a unique opportunity to recoup a significant portion of their initiative expenses. Testbed Sponsors, including several OGC Strategic Members, are supporting this vision with cost-sharing funds to partially offset the costs associated with development, engineering, and demonstration of these outcomes. In 2021 and 2022, OGC’s COSI Program (formerly the Innovation Program) gave over US$2 Million per year back to the geospatial community via COSI Initiatives.

Testbed-19 that will pave the way towards new levels of location interoperability across the following topics:

• Geospatial in Space: aims to free OGC standards and technologies from Terrestrial constraints and allow geospatial analytic tools and techniques to be used on other astronomical bodies as well as in deep space. Testbed-19 will also fully integrate the terrestrial and extraterrestrial analytic toolset and processes.
• Machine Learning (ML): aims to document current approaches and possible alternatives to lay out a path for future standardization of interoperable/transferable ML Models for Earth Observation applications.
• Geodatacubes (GDC): aims to define the GDC API and metadata model, test the new API against a set of use cases, develop implementations that allow further experimentation, and develop a number of client applications for both data access and advanced visualization.
• Analysis Ready Data (ARD): aims to create, develop, identify, and implement ARD capabilities to advance informational data at the right place and at the right time. The ease-of-use of ARD will be increased through improving the backend standardization and disparate use-case scenario implementations.
• Agile Reference Architecture: aims to create, develop and identify the architecture elements for agile reference architectures and understand how these can be used for defining different use-cases that allow different implementations for API Building Blocks. This work is seeking to inform how Resilient Data Services in the generation after next will operate.
• High Performance Computing (HPC): aims to evaluate previous work in using HPC for geospatial analytics and help develop High-Performance Geospatial Computing standards.

As the largest Research & Development (R&D) Initiatives conducted under OGC’s COSI Program, OGC Testbeds exist at the cutting edge of technology, actively exploring and evaluating future geospatial technologies to solve today’s problems. The solutions developed in Testbeds eventually move into the OGC Standards Program, where they are reviewed, revised, and potentially approved as new international open standards that can reach millions of individuals.

The development of Testbed topics is a collaborative process between OGC and interested sponsors. During the first phase (November, December, January), sponsors and the OGC team work together to refine use cases and requirements on the sponsor side and transform these into actual work items. Each work item will be assigned to an OGC member organization for implementation during the Testbed-19 execution phase. Once these discussions are complete, OGC will develop a Call for Participation that is planned to be released to the public in early February. After a 45-day response period, OGC together with the sponsors will select the best participants based on the received proposals to form the Testbed-19 team. The execution phase, the phase of system design, rapid prototyping, testing, and documentation will be executed from May to December 2023.

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