15 September 2014 — Communication of location information plays an increasingly important role in human activities, and there is still time to join a yearly testbed focused on solving the difficult issues involved in location communication and integration.

In recent weeks, sponsors committed to supporting the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Testbed 11 have been documenting use cases, submitting requirements, and interoperability scenarios for this testbed. Organizations selected to participate in OWS-11 are committing to develop solutions based on these scenarios. Participant solutions will implement both existing OGC standards as well as new prototype interface and encoding specifications that may be developed in the testbed. Prototype specifications may ultimately become OGC standards.

This cutting edge technology work has enormous potential for testbed stakeholders – both the technology users and the technology providers – and for the world at large.

The OGC membership would like to enlist additional sponsors to slightly broaden the scope and share the cost of this testbed. Interested potential sponsors who contact the testbed organizers will benefit first by learning at an early stage who the other sponsors are, what issues they are focused on, and what new capabilities are in the industry pipeline. If new potential sponsors' requirements align roughly with what is now in the plan, those organizations can still become sponsors and tune the testbed plan to meet their needs. The current Testbed 11 plan addresses:

  • Interface and Encoding engineering
    • REST and SOAP for the OGC suite of service standards
    • Using JSON and GeoJSON across OGC service standards.
    • Security – standards based solutions to implementing Authentication, Authorization, Access, Control and Auditing capabilities for the suite of OGC service standards.
    • Semantically Enabled OGC Web Services: Semantic Mediation between Vocabularies and Ontologies; Linked Data; Data Provenance

Climate change is the theme for the Testbed 11 scenario. The specific use case is a displaced population due to coastal inundation. Solving the use case will involve:

  • Services based on OGC standards to support crisis notification, predictive analysis, rapid access to data, access to social media
  • Implementations of many existing OGC standards
  • Incorporating social media in emergency response

Additional requirements regarding Geo4NIEM and Aviation are being reviewed.

If you are interested in possibly joining OGC's Testbed 11 as a sponsor or if you want to learn more about this opportunity for technology provider participants, please contact Lew Leinenweber, Director Interoperability Programs (lleinenweber [at] opengeospatial.org).

The OGC® is an international geospatial standards consortium of more than 475 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 http://www.opengeospatial.org/.

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