OGC Testbed-19 Call For Sponsors: Interoperability and Collaboration from Oceans to Space

OGC Testbeds provide a unique opportunity for sponsors, together with the world’s leading geospatial IT experts, to tackle location data and processing challenges.

24 November 2022: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is currently preparing its next major Innovation Initiative, Testbed-19, which builds upon the success and outcomes of Testbed-17, Testbed-18, and other Collaborative Solution and Innovation (COSI) Program Initiatives (formerly the OGC Innovation Program). Testbeds provide a unique opportunity for sponsors to work with the world’s leading geospatial IT experts to tackle location data & processing challenges together. OGC is now inviting any potential sponsor organizations to bring forward their technology integration and other technological challenges. Responses are due by December 31, 2022.

Challenges put forth by sponsoring organizations will be refined and mapped to a set of work items that OGC member organizations will compete to address. The OGC COSI team (formerly the Innovation Program), together with the sponsors, will then select the most qualified organizations to join Testbed-19 and help solve these challenges.

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. Testbed participants follow a rapid prototyping approach to design, develop, and test solutions to sponsors’ location-related challenges.

OGC’s annual Testbeds are the Consortium’s largest COSI Program initiatives. Testbeds boost Research & Development (R&D) to make location data and services more FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable. 

OGC Testbeds provide a unique opportunity to explore technologies that appear disconnected at first glance. Combining these technologies in a single initiative and bringing several sponsors together allows OGC to create an interoperability environment that comes much closer to real-world situations. In consequence, Testbeds allow leveraging an outstanding quality of synergetic effects and address challenges that require collaboration among several sponsors and experts from member organizations.

Solutions developed in OGC Testbeds have gone on to form standards and technologies that now play critical roles in numerous domains across the world.

The technical scope of Testbed-19 is determined in a collaborative process between OGC staff and OGC sponsor organizations. Potentially fruitful technology areas for Testbed-19 to address include, but are not limited to:

• Agile Reference Architecture
• Foundational Standards for Space
• GeoDataCubes
• High Performance Computing 
• Machine Learning and Training Data
• OGC APIs
• Open Science

An expanded list of potential areas to be addressed in Testbed-19 is available in the CFS document.

OGC’s Testbed-19 will be conducted under OGC's Innovation Program, a collaborative, agile, and hands-on prototyping and engineering environment where sponsors and OGC members come together to address location interoperability challenges while validating international open standards. To learn about the benefits of sponsoring an OGC Innovation Program Initiative such as this, visit the OGC Innovation Program webpage, or watch this short video on how OGC’s Innovation Program can benefit your organization.

The Testbed-19 Call For Sponsors (CFS) document – which includes further information on the Testbed, as well as how to submit a sponsorship proposal – is available now on the OGC Testbed-19 Webpage. Responses are due by December 31, 2022.

About OGC

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a collective problem-solving community of more than 550 experts representing industry, government, research and academia, collaborating to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

The global OGC Community engages in a mix of activities related to location-based technologies: developing consensus-based open standards and best-practices; collaborating on problem solving in agile innovation initiatives; participating in member meetings, events, and workshops; and more.

OGC's unique standards development process moves at the pace of innovation, with constant input from technology forecasting, practical prototyping, real-world testing, and community engagement.

OGC bridges disparate sectors, domains, and technology trends, and encourages the cross-pollination of ideas between different communities of practice to improve decision-making at all levels. OGC is committed to creating an inclusive and sustainable future.

Visit ogc.org for more info on our work.