-The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has issued a Request for Quotations/Call for Participation (RFQ/CFP) to solicit proposals in response to requirements for the OGC Web Services, Phase 9 (OWS-9) Testbed (http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/initiatives/ows-9).The RFQ/CFP is available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/86. Responses are due by 5 pm EST on April 6, 2012.

A bidders’ teleconference will be held on March 9, 2012. More information will be available at the URL above. The Point of Contact is Nadine Alameh: techdesk@opengeospatial.org.

The OWS-9 sponsors are:

-   AGC (Army Geospatial Center, US Army Corps of Engineers)

-   CREAF-GeoViQua-EC (CREAF is the European Center for Research in Ecology and Forestry Applications)

-   EUROCONTROL

-   FAA (US Federal Aviation Administration)

-   GeoConnections - Natural Resources Canada

-   Lockheed Martin Corporation

-   NASA (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

-   NGA (US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency)

-   USGS (US Geological Survey)

OWS-9 builds on the outcomes of prior OGC initiatives (http://www.opengeospatial.org/resource/demos) and is organized around the following threads:

-   Aviation: Develop and demonstrate the use of the Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM) and the Weather Exchange Model  (WXXM) in an OGC Web Services environment, focusing on support for several Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) project requirements as well as FAA's Aeronautical Information Management (AIM) and Aircraft Access to SWIM (System Wide Information Management) (AAtS) requirements.

-   Cross-Community Interoperability (CCI): Build on the CCI work accomplished in OWS–8 by increasing interoperability within communities sharing geospatial data, focusing on semantic mediation, query results delivery, data provenance and quality and Single Point of Entry Global Gazetteer.

-   Security and Services Interoperability (SSI): Investigate 5 main activities: Security Management, OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard Application Schema UGAS (UML to GML Application Schema) Updates, Web Services Façade, Reference Architecture Profiling, and Bulk Data Transfer.

-   OWS Innovations: Explore topics that represent either new areas of work for the Consortium (such as GPS and Mobile Applications), a desire for new approaches to existing technologies to solve new challenges (such as the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) work), or some combination of the two.

-   Compliance & Interoperability Testing & Evaluation (CITE): Develop a suite of compliance test scripts for testing and validation of products with interfaces implementing the following OGC standards: Web Map Service (WMS) 1.3 Interface Standard, Web Feature Service (WFS) 2.0 Interface Standard, Geography Markup Language (GML) 3.2.1 Encoding Standard, OWS Context 1.0 (candidate encoding standard), Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards, Web Coverage Service for Earth Observation (WCS-EO) 1.0 Interface Standard, and TEAM (Test, Evaluation, And Measurement) Engine Capabilities.

The RFQ/CFP includes details of these threads as well as details on participation eligibility, selection process and kickoff workshop information.

OGC testbeds, pilot projects and interoperability experiments are part of the OGC Interoperability Program, a global, hands-on collaborative prototyping program designed to rapidly develop, test and deliver proven candidate standards into the OGC Specification Program, where they are formalized for public release.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 440 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial 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/.