The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) invites interested organizations to attend the January 15 OWS-9 Testbed Demonstration and Exhibition. This event will be held as part of the OGC Technical Committee meeting at the Esri campus in Redlands, California, 14-18 January 2012.

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 spatial encoding and interface standards into the OGC Standards Program, where they are formalized for release as adopted OGC Standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT.

In OGC testbeds, sponsoring organizations provide requirements and funding. Participating technology providers provide standards development that is aligned with their product development programs. OWS-9 sponsorship totaled $2.65 million USD and attracted an in-kind contribution of more than $5 million. The ten OWS-9 sponsors from the US, Canada and Europe who shared the costs and contributed the requirements have missions ranging from environmental management and civil government mapping to maintaining common operating pictures in disaster zones and battlefields. Working on specific interoperability problems detailed in the sponsors' use cases and scenarios, the 45 industry participants in OWS-9 have delivered extraordinary value:

• Aviation: The Aviation world got open standards support for modern, web-accessible Aeronautical Information Services that can adapt as technology changes.
• Cross-Community Interoperability (CCI): Communities sharing spatial data got a better location search capability, improved ability to track data's origins, real-time fusion of data from multiple sensors, and a standard for a Global Gazetteer capable of real-time translation of spatial semantics to match, for example, "dead end street" with "cul-de-sac." 
• Security and Services Interoperability (SSI): Communities sharing spatial data got recommendations for Security Management, a way to automate the creation of implementable data schemas from abstract models, easier use of OGC Web Services, methods for more efficient design of architectures, and a standard that helps users manage large spatial databases that are being edited by intermittently-connected mobile device users. 
• OGC Web Services (OWS) innovations: Technologists involved in spatial communication technology got new OGC compliance tests and improved interoperability for mobile device apps that use OGC standards in providing location services. 

The OWS-9 sponsors responsible for these important advancements in spatial technology include:

•    Army Geospatial Center, US Army Corps of Engineers (AGC)
•    European Center for Research in Ecology and Forestry Applications (CREAF-GeoViQua-EC)
•    EUROCONTROL
•    GeoConnections - Natural Resources Canada
•    Lockheed Martin Corporation
•    US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
•    US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
•    US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)
•    US Geological Survey (USGS)
•    UK Ministry of Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (UK DSTL)

For more information and to register for the OWS-9 Testbed Demonstration, please visit here. 

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has also issued a call for sponsors of the 10^th annual OGC Web Services Testbed (OWS-10) (http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/initiatives/ows-10). OWS-10 will build on the outcomes of the OWS-9 Testbed (http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/initiatives/ows-9) and other prior OGC initiatives (http://www.opengeospatial.org/resource/demos).

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 475 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available spatial standards. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.