The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) is releasing this Call for Participation (“CFP”) to solicit proposals for the Earth Observation Exploitation Platform Hackathon 2018 (“the Hackathon”) initiative. The Hackathon builds on results from the recently concluded Testbed-13 initiative and paves the way for Tested-14 and subsequent initiatives in the context of deployment and execution of applications in cloud environments. The goal is to demonstrate that the Testbed-13 results, described in the Engineering Reports OGC Testbed-13: Exploitation Platform Application Package (OGC 17-023) and OGC Testbed-13: Application Deployment and Execution Service (OGC 17-024) are fit for purpose. Further background on Testbed-13 Cloud work is provided by OGC Testbed-13: Cloud (OGC 17-035). Given that these Engineering Reports state several options, this Hackathon shall identify the best solution and identify any missing elements as basis for Testbed-14. More details are provided in section Technical Architecture.

Under this CFP, the OGC will provide reimbursements of travel expenses on behalf of sponsoring organizations (“Sponsors”). This CFP requests proposals from organizations (“Bidders”) wishing to participate. Bidders do not need to be OGC member organizations. Any Bidder interested in participation should respond by submitting a proposal per the instructions provided herein. All proposals will be reviewed by the organization team, consisting of OGC, the European Space Agency (ESA), and Natural Resources Canada (NRCan). The organization team applies the following selection criteria: Clear statement of the bidder’s motivation to participate in the Hackathon, sufficient prior knowledge and software code to implement the Hackathon architecture within the timeframe of the Hackathon, description of intended future use of the technology, and reasonable travel costs compensation request. OGC reserves the right to cap the number of participants to ensure a reasonable size of the Hackathon. Travel cost compensation is only available to entities from ESA Member States and Canada, except for Hungary.

The Hackathon is executed under the OGC Innovation Program that provides global, hands-on, collaborative prototyping for rapid development and delivery of candidate specifications to other Innovation Program activities and to the OGC Standards Program.

In order to participate in this Hackathon, it is sufficient to fill out this Application Form. By submitting your application, you express your:

Proposals must be submitted before the appropriate response due date indicated in the Master Schedule. Organizations are invited to team up with other organizations or to submit proposals individually. Teaming up can even be discussed during the setup phase of kick-off.

This CFP is open to OGC members and non-members. Information submitted in response to this CFP will be accessible to OGC and Sponsor staff members. This information will remain in the control of these stakeholders and will not be used for other purposes without prior written consent of the Bidder. Each Participant selected to participate in this Hackathon will be required to enter into a Participation Agreement contract (“PA”) with the OGC.

Once the original CFP has been published, OGC is organizing a CFP Clarifications phone conference. Bidders may submit questions via timely submission of email(s) to the OGC Technology Desk (techdesk@opengeospatial.org) prior to the CFP Clarifications phone conference or pose questions during the conference. Question submitters will remain anonymous, and answers will be regularly compiled and published on the CFP clarifications page.

The following table details the major Testbed milestones and events:

Kickoff Workshop: A Kickoff Workshop (“Kickoff”) is a face-to-face meeting with the option to attend via Web conference (GoToMeeting). It is guided by OGC staff and sponsors and allows participants to exchange ideas. The main purpose is to refine the Hackathon architecture and settle upon specific interface models to be used as a baseline for prototype component interoperability. Participants will be required to attend the Kickoff either in person or by Web conference.

Decision Conference: Conducted one week after the kick-off meeting, the Decision Conference web conference will decide any outstanding design decisions from the kick-off meeting. It is the conference with all participants prior to the Preparation Conference.

After the Decision Conference, all Hackathon activities will be conducted remotely. Communication overhead is reduced to email-list discussions.

Preparation Conference: This webinar discusses details for the Demonstration Meeting.

Demonstration Workshop: Physical meeting, where participants demonstrate their results.

After the demonstration meeting, all participants, sponsors, and OGC staff develop the Hackathon Results Engineering Report.

The clarifications Webinar took place on Mon Feb 19th, 11:00 AM EST. The Webinar was recorded. The recording is available online (23MB file!). The following questions have been raised:

1. Can I participate as a cloud provider?

YES, you can participate as a cloud provider by making computing resources, Virtual Machines, or storage capacity available. In that case, please contact Ingo Simonis directly at isimonis@opengeospatial.org.

2. Can I provide a different application as well?

YES, if you do provide the corresponding application package in addition. In principle, we can run any type of application as long as the application is properly described, follows the data location mapping approaches agreed upon at the kick-off meeting, and loads the required data from a Web accessible archive.

3. What level of flexibility do you have regarding the architecture defined in the annex Technical Architecture?

In principle, this Hackathon has the goal to identify the best solution for the given problem, i.e. the provisioning of arbitrary applications in heterogeneous clouds to allow their execution close to the actual data. Testbed-13 has addressed this problem and documented a set of solutions and recommendations in the Engineering Reports listed above. This does not mean that we are 100% bound to what was developed in Testbed-13. We want to use it as a baseline, but allow room for discussions that may lead to modifications. Therefore we welcome additional ideas. In any case, the goal is to develop a sustainable solution for an Application Package that allows executing arbitrary applications in different environments. This solution shall lead to an open OGC standard.

4. A parallel set of studies has been run by us that led to a solution that allows running processes in cloud environments easily. We continue this work in other research projects. Would that solution be of interest to the Hackathon?

YES, as said before, the goal is to develop an open standard. Currently, we are still trying to understand the best solution for the given problem. We are aware that many research projects address this challenge. The goal here is to develop the best solution in an open, collaborative approach, following the well-established OGC consensus process that eventually leads to an open standard. We invite all research projects to join us in this activity. We invite all interested parties to join our ad hoc meeting during the next OGC Technical Committee meeting in Orleans, Tuesday, March 20th, 15:15-16:45h. At that meeting, we will discuss the topic in general with the goal to coordinate between different activities, standardization efforts, and R&D work executed in different organizations or consortia.

5. We are surprised that we need to submit a proposal in order to participate. Is it possible to join the Hackathon just to learn?

The proposal serves the purpose to allow us understanding your motivation to join the Hackathon and to learn about your background. The Application Form is very simple and should not take more than 5min to provide brief answers to the few questions. If you like, you can participate as an observer, though we appreciate your more active participation.

6. We do have a fully functional implementation of what you are trying to develop here. Does it make sense for us to demonstrate our solution?

We are interested in developing the best solution that shall be released as an open standard eventually. If you are willing to through your solution as an example into the consensus process, then we appreciate your participation. Key is the willingness to help us, not the interest to sell a given product.

7. Is the Hackathon only open to Testbed-13 participants?

No, the Hackathon is open to everyone, even non-OGC members. The results of Testbed-13 are publicly available, and there is absolutely no requirement for previous participation in the Testbed. Being familiar with the OGC process, in particular the consensus principle, certainly helps, though.

8. What is the link with Testbed-14?

Testbed-14 will build on results from Testbed-13 and this Hackathon. Testbed-14 focuses on three aspects: First, complex workflows where a workflow includes several processing steps that feed into each other and that might be distributed across several clouds. Second, security aspects, and third billing and quoting, as application consumers are not running any software locally, costs may occur on the clouds that need to be covered.

9. What profile are participants expected to have?

We expect that any organisation with EO Exploitation and/or Cloud Processing or similar experience will be able join. In essence anyone with the skills and the willingness to work in consensus towards interoperability can participate.

10. What Cloud Infrastructure will be available?

The following commercial cloud providers offered to support the activity:

The conditions will be disclosed at the kick-off meeting.