Geospatial to the Edge Interoperability Plugfest

The Geospatial to the Edge Interoperability Plugfest, co-sponsored by Army Geospatial Center and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA/CIO&T) brings together technology implementers and data providers to advance the interoperability of geospatial products and services based on OGC profiles. The Plugfest assists tool enhancement and provide guidance to improve the delivery of enterprise geospatial data to end users. Examples of how end user communities benefits are:

• First responders, relief workers and fire fighters preparing for and operating in austere network environments.  
• Emergency planners and managers supporting hurricane, wildfire, and earthquake preparedness,  relief/response activities and damage assessment.
• Soldiers/warfighters during planning and executing operations specifically in disconnected, intermittent, and limited network environments.   

Results of the Plugfest are documented in the OGC Geospatial to the Edge Plugfest Engineering Report

What is a plugfest?

A Plugfest is an OGC Innovation Program type of initiative that provides a venue and scenarios to test and validate that software products can interoperate with other products implementing the same standards. In a Plugfest sponsors and technology implementers come together in a collaborative agile process to solve geospatial challenges.

What is a profile?

An OGC profile is a subset of a standard that helps better share information within a community of interest. A profile is a specification that imposes additional constraints on an existing standard to make that standard more focused to the needs of the user community. A profile can also be extended to offer specialized functionality, for example, make previously optional capabilities mandatory, or define extensions where permitted by the base standard. 

The profiles that are planned to be used in this activity include: raster and vector NSG GeoPackages, NSG WMTS, NSG WMS, and maybe NSG WFS.

Benefits of Participation

Participating in this plugfest offers commercial vendors and open source projects significant national (and international) exposure to the GEOINT community, as well as geospatial technology purchasers in general. 

The Plugfest is a prime opportunity for software vendors to cooperatively test and refine services, interfaces and protocols in the context of a hands-on engineering experience that raises the visibility of all participants. The Plugfest also calls attention to the importance and availability of interoperability while using community profiles based on open standards. This initiative is designed to increase particular client-server interoperability capabilities in a way that leverages and contributes to interoperable geospatial services across different communities.

Schedule 

Links to related documents

• Wiki: https://github.com/opengeospatial/geoedge-plugfest/wiki/

• The Call for Participation provides deatailed work to be performed.

• Clarification Webinar held on December 18 2019 presentation and recording.

• Form to respond to the Call For Participation.

• UK Plugfest Engineering Report provides a good example of a previous plugfest.

FAQ

• The time commitment is very small compare to other initiatives.
• This activity provides no funding to participants. Benefits translate in improving their software to be better used in the GEOINT community.
• More information about data will be available in January 2018. GeoPackage data following the NSG profiles will be made available, as well as raw vector data to be encoded following the NSG profiles.
• Data used will have no restrictions.

For more information contact Luis Bermudez, Executive Director Innovation Program (lbermudez at opengeospatial.org)