OGC Research Program: Pilot Initiative

Making geospatial scientific workflows transparent, reproducible, and reusable across the platforms on which Earth science is carried out.

Call for Participation open — proposals due 20 July 2026

For more information, contact in********@*gc.org.

Overview

The Open Science Persistent Demonstrator (OSPD) is an inter-agency initiative led by OGC together with NASA, ESA, the EU FOCAL project, and I-GUIDE. Its long-term goal is to make geospatial scientific workflows transparent, reproducible, and reusable across the many platforms on which Earth science is carried out.

OSPD 2026, sponsored by NASA, is the next phase of that programme. It narrows scope to deepen one part of the open-science description stack: the description of geospatial processing activities within provenance chains. It does so through a profile-plus-register pattern — the provenance profile answers “what activity happened?”, while the register supplies the controlled term that names it.

What the Pilot Delivers

  • A provenance profile — built on W3C PROV and published as an OGC Building Block with a tested JSON implementation schema.
  • A populated process-type register — controlled terms with stable identifiers, federating with OpenEO, NASA, and machine-learning vocabularies rather than replacing them.
  • Tested workflow provenance examples — real profiled workflows that reference the register, including a demonstration in OGC API — Processes.
  • An OGC Engineering Report — documenting implementation experience, validation, and recommendations for future OGC work.

Master Schedule

ID Date Milestone
M01 19 Jun 2026 Public release of the Call for Participation
M02 06 Jul 2026 Final deadline to submit questions
M03 20 Jul 2026 Proposals due (23:59 EDT)
M04 30 Jul 2026 Kick-off meeting (virtual)
M05 31 Aug 2026 Activity 1 complete — generic provenance Building Block
M06 7 Sep 2026 Activities 2 & 3 complete — profiling examples; register ready
M07 21 Sep 2026 Activity 4 complete — register populated and ready for handover
M08 28 Sep 2026 Comprehensive draft Report due
M09 12–15 Oct 2026 OGC Connect, Cape Town
M10 26 Oct 2026 Final demonstrations and Engineering Report due

Participation

OSPD 2026 invites OGC members to bid for funded positions as Workflow Profiler, with two positions available, and Register Implementer, with one position available, plus an in-kind OGC API — Processes Profiler position.

OGC staff serve as Report Editor. The pilot is sponsored by NASA and conducted under the OGC Collaborative Solutions and Innovation (COSI) Program.

Full scope, deliverables, and bidding instructions are in the Call for Participation. Questions may be submitted via the OSPD 2026 Question Form until 06 July 2026.

The full Call for Participation (CFP) for Open Science Persistent Demonstrator 2026 is available from the links below:

About OGC

The Open Geospatial Consortium is an international community of more than 500 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities working to make location information FAIR — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.