Results of OGC’s biggest Innovation Initiative in 2019, Testbed-15, are now available

The latest advances in Geospatial Data Processing, Analysis, and Visualization have been documented in Testbed-15’s Sixteen Engineering Reports

1 April 2020: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has published the outcomes of 2019’s biggest research and development initiative, Testbed-15. The key outcomes, including detailed Engineering Reports, overview presentations, and videos, are freely available on the Testbed-15 webpage. Testbed-15 advanced research across the following technologies:

• Earth Observation (EO) data models, applications, catalogues, and process discovery.
• Data Security in a geospatial environment using encrypted containers.
• Federated Cloud Environments incorporating OGC Open Web Services.
• Secure Delta Updates to geospatial data in Denied, Disrupted, Intermittent, and Limited (DDIL) situations.
• An Open Portrayal Framework and APIs for sharing portrayals of geospatial content.
• Machine Learning models and outputs integrating with OGC Open Web Services.

OGC Testbed-15 was sponsored by Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), European Space Agency (ESA), Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), US Geological Survey (USGS), and US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

OGC Testbeds, an annual activity of OGC’s Innovation Program, are fast-paced, multi-vendor, collaborative efforts where participants follow a rapid prototyping approach to design, develop, and test solutions to sponsors’ location-related problems. OGC Testbeds give room for research and new ideas, while also exploring the “fitness for use” of existing standards and solutions. Watch this short video on YouTube about how OGC’s Innovation Program can benefit your organization.

OGC Testbed results, documented in Engineering Reports, are provided to OGC’s Standards Program, where they are reviewed, revised, and potentially advanced as new international open standards. Alongside the sixteen Engineering Reports, Testbed-15 resulted in advancements to the suite of draft OGC APIs, including APIs related to Styles, Maps, Tiles, Records, and the OGC API-Common building block. Further work focused on extensions to GeoPackage, and technologies including Machine Learning and Earth Observation “applications to the data.”

The key outcomes of Testbed-15, including detailed Engineering Reports, overview presentations, and videos, are freely available on the Testbed-15 webpage.

Anyone interested in learning more about, or observing, OGC’s current Testbed-16 initiative should contact techdesk@ogc.org. Testbed-16 will address some of the hottest geospatial IT topics of this new decade, including: Earth Observation APIs and applications in the cloud with Jupyter Notebook and JupyterLab; Machine Learning; strong semantics in the aviation domain; Analysis Ready Data; security for geospatial data; Discrete Global Grids; and more.

About OGC

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of more than 530 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities driven to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

OGC’s member-driven consensus process creates royalty free, publicly available geospatial standards. Existing at the cutting edge, OGC actively analyzes and anticipates emerging tech trends, and runs an agile, collaborative Research and Development (R&D) lab that builds and tests innovative prototype solutions to members' use cases.

OGC members together form a global forum of experts and communities that use location to connect people with technology and improve decision-making at all levels. OGC is committed to creating a sustainable future for us, our children, and future generations.

Visit ogc.org for more info on our work.