Jointly Explore Location Challenges

OGC Testbeds are OGC’s largest Innovation Program (IP) initiatives. Testbeds boost research and development to make location data and information more FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-Usable. Testbeds provide a unique opportunity for sponsors to tackle location data and processing challenges together with the world’s leading geospatial IT experts.

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Building on the success and outcomes of Testbed-15 and Testbed-16 as well as other IP initiatives, OGC is now starting the preparation of Testbed-17. If you are interested in being part of this critical and once a year opportunity to shape collaborative innovation activities, please contact the head of OGC’s Innovation Program, Dr. Ingo Simonis, via the OGC Innovation Program contact form to discuss your organization’s technology and technology integration challenges.

Challenges put forth by sponsoring organizations are refined and mapped to a set of work items that OGC member organizations will compete to address. The Innovation Program team together with the OGC member sponsors will then select the most qualified organizations to join Testbed-17. In a collaborative effort, all Testbed participants, sponsors, and the OGC team work jointly on the goal to stepwise increase Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) of geospatial IT solutions, including software architecture, interface design, information and data models, as well as related standards and specifications.

Synergistic Effects

Testbeds are multi-sponsor initiatives and benefit from synergistic effects caused by overlapping interests. Sponsorship for individual tasks can be shared across sponsors, which allows to explore new technology more deeply and ensures more realistic use cases and scenarios. The IP team collects the sponsors' areas of interest early in the process and shares the full picture among all sponsors. This allows sponsors to identify common interests and leads to more efficient use of the available resources. In the ongoing Testbed-16, 6 out of 11 tasks are jointly sponsored by several sponsoring OGC members.

Technical Scope

The technical scope of Testbed-17 is determined by a requirements collection process led by OGC staff that involves multiple OGC member sponsors from around the globe. The process takes experiences from ongoing and recently completed initiatives into account and considers the OGC Technology Trends. The latter were used as a basis for a survey sent to all OGC members in June 2020 to identify priority areas for OGC members. When asked for their level of interest or potential impact to their organization, over 80% of the respondents identified Geospatial Data Science and Spatial Data on the Web as top priorities and impact areas.

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In addition, the following technology areas have been identified in early conversations with sponsors, geospatial data experts, and OGC members. The list is not exhaustive.

  • Big Data Analytics: Datacubes, containerized applications, exploration platforms

  • Analysis Ready Data: The “all-in” architecture that integrates the various technologies and current efforts available in OGC

  • COVID-19, healthcare, and location data

  • Pub/Sub: Asynchronous communication, and the development and test of extensions to OGC to API-Common

  • Tiling and Streaming: Optimized data access

  • New Space; the combination of technology and market advances from rocket launches, small satellites, orbital planes, evolving sensor modalities and new ground infrastructures, and the uptake of agile thinking and new business models

  • Distributed data processing and data processing pipelines

  • Federated Security and Data Centric Security

  • Features extraction and modeling from Full Motion Video

  • Cloud Native: OGC APIs including STAC and Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF

  • Aviation information management

  • OGC APIs coordination effort and building of resource models

  • 3D data access and seamless 2D/3D/4D transitions

  • Edge Computing: Machine learning using imaging sensors at the edge

  • Model interoperability: use of static geometry models along with predictive models of built environment viewed in gaming environment

  • Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

  • Advanced semantics and data integration challenges

If you are interested in sponsoring Testbed-17, OGC staff will help you develop detailed requirements, and will identify cross-sponsor synergies for you. The following schedule identifies the major steps towards Testbed-17.

Timeline

The following timeline shows the major initiative milestones and events.

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About the OGC Innovation Program

The OGC Innovation Program (OGC IP) is an innovative, collaborative, and hands-on engineering and rapid prototyping program. In the IP, OGC members bring forward technology and technology integration challenges. These challenges are refined and mapped to a set of requirements, use cases, and implementation scenarios and eventually addressed in different types of initiatives. These initiatives bring OGC vendors and research institutions together with sponsoring organizations. Coordinated and managed by the OGC IP Team, each initiative has the goal to stepwise increase Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) for geospatial IT solutions, including software architecture, interface design, information and data models, as well as related standards and specifications. Run globally, the Innovation Program further validates and tests geospatial technology based on OGC standards and identifies future OGC standardization work items.

Call to Action

Interested? Please contact chief scientist and head of the Innovation Program, Dr. Ingo Simonis, via the OGC Innovation Program contact form. The first sponsor coordination telephone conferences are planned for mid July and early September. If you are interested, please get in contact no later than September 1st.