OGC Calls for Participation in Testbed-18, its Annual Major Innovation Testbed; Funding Available for Participants

OGC Testbed-18 will pave the way towards new levels of interoperability in areas as diverse as New Space, Machine Learning, Open Science, and Building Energy.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) invites interested organizations to respond to a Call for Participation (CFP) for OGC’s Testbed-18 Innovation Initiative, a collaborative effort to rapidly prototype, design, develop and test solutions to location-related problems. Responses are due by March 17th, 2022.

The Testbed-18 initiative will explore six tasks, including advanced Spatial Data Interoperability for Building Energy; Secure, Asynchronous Catalogs; Identifiers for Reproducible Science; Moving Features and Sensor Integration; 3D+ Data Standards and Streaming; and Machine Learning Training Data.

Testbed-18 provides an outstanding opportunity to engage with and lead the latest research on geospatial system design, concept development, and rapid prototyping. The Initiative provides a business opportunity for stakeholders to mutually define, refine, and evolve service interfaces and protocols in the context of hands-on experience and feedback. By participating in Testbed-18, you will shape the future of geospatial software development and data publication.

Testbed-18 offers selected Participants a unique opportunity to recoup a significant portion of their initiative expenses. Testbed Sponsors, including several OGC Strategic Members, are supporting this vision with cost-sharing funds to partially offset the costs associated with development, engineering, and demonstration of these outcomes. Last year alone, OGC’s Innovation Program gave US$2.1 Million dollars back to the geospatial community via its Innovation Initiatives.

Testbed-18 that will pave the way towards new levels of location interoperability across the following topics:

• The New Space Paradigm and 3D+ Data Standards and Streaming: This is the first time that an OGC Testbed is looking beyond earth and exploring sensor and object integration of assets in celestial orbits or in free flight in our solar system. Eventually, a suite of multi-dimension (3D+) standards must be created that expands upon existing standards to cover broader needs. Such ‘space interoperability’ is laying important groundwork for the commercialization of space.
• Moving Features and sensor integration will lead to a robust framework of standards that enable interoperability for a wide spectrum of sensors, command and control systems, and analytical systems.
• Machine Learning (ML) training datasets will help us understand how to standardize ML training data in order to guarantee compatibility and quality in future geospatial ML models.
• Work on reproducible science is an important contribution to emerging Open Science Environments, as it makes scientific analysis and results much simpler to reproduce.
• Secure, asynchronous catalogs are a second contribution to open science environments that addresses the increasingly complex challenge of finding a needle of useful data in the ever-growing haystack of data sources and services.
• Energy building spatial data interoperability will address how to build robust platforms for a specific community that bridges all the way from raw data collection to decision makers – a topic of urgent concern with the current (and likely ongoing) sky-rocketing energy prices.

As the largest Research & Development (R&D) Initiatives conducted under OGC’s Innovation Program, OGC Testbeds exist at the cutting edge of technology, actively exploring and evaluating future geospatial technologies to solve today’s problems. The solutions developed in Testbeds eventually move into the OGC Standards Program, where they are reviewed, revised, and potentially approved as new international open standards that can reach millions of individuals.

OGC’s Innovation Program is 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.

Organizations interested in learning more about, or participating in, Testbed-18 can contact the OGC Innovation Program team using this contact form. Further information about Testbed-18, including the Call For Participation, is available at ogc.org/testbed18. 

A Bidders Q&A Webinar will occur on February 24. Any questions to be addressed in the Webinar must be submitted by February 18. Instructions on how to submit questions, as well as register to attend, are contained in the CFP, Appendix B.2.

Responses to the Testbed-18 Call For Participation are due by March 17th, 2022. The project will officially start with a kick-off meeting scheduled for early April, 2022. Participation is open only to OGC Members. Proposals from non-members can be submitted with a completed application for OGC membership, or a letter of intent that is submitted prior to, or with their proposal.

Categories: Announcement, Public Comment

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