OGC Testbed-18

News and Updates:

– Update Jan 28, 2023: Testbed-18 Demonstration Days (Virtual) Highlights to build an engaged geospatial community:

• Over 550 registered;
• Over 420 attended;
• Over 40+ Speakers.

Video recordings of the T18 Demo Days describing the outcomes and demonstrating the user experiences can be found in this OGC Testbed-18 YouTube Playlist. The outcomes of Testbed-18 are documented in the following OGC Engineering Report webpage.

– Update Jan 1, 2023: OGC welcomes all to attend a two-day virtual event and series of demonstrations highlighting the importance of collective development of location interoperability solutions: Testbed 18 Demonstration Days. Please check Testbed-18 Demonstration Days (Virtual) webpage for more information.

– Update 1 November 2022: Testbed-18 online outreach and demonstration days will be on January 17th and 18th, 2023.

– Update 31 October 2022: November 18th, 2022, is the final deadline for posting the DER (Draft Engineering Report) to pending to meet the 3-week rule before the technical committee (TC) electronic vote for publication.

– Update 15 July 2022: With 3D+ Data Standards and Streaming kick-off on 15 July 2022, all the tasks of Testbed-18 have already started, and participants are actively engaged in the necessary activities to produce the Engineering Reports.

– Update 26 April 2022: We are in the final negotiations stage with bidders for the first four tasks that will kick-off May 3-5, 2022, in a virtual meeting. Please find the tentative schedule for this meeting below.

– Update 22 April 2022: Thanks a lot for all your proposals! We have started negotiations with bidders and will get in contact with you soon. Negotiations for three tasks, 3D+ Data Standards and Streaming, Machine Learning Training Datasets, and Moving Features and Sensor Integration, will start a bit later in April as we wait for final sponsor contracts to come in.

• Video Demonstrations: Video recordings of the T18 Demo Days describing the outcomes and demonstrating the user experiences can be found in this OGC Testbed-18 YouTube Playlist.
• Engineering Reports: The outcomes of Testbed-18 are documented in the following OGC Engineering Report webpage.

Testbed-18: Advancing Location Interoperability: Help Boosting Location Interoperability

OGC Testbeds are OGC’s largest Innovation Program (IP) initiatives. Testbeds boost research and development to make location data and information more FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-Usable. Testbeds provide a unique opportunity for sponsors to tackle location data and processing challenges together with the world’s leading geospatial IT experts.

As part of the Testbed development process, challenges put forth by sponsoring organizations are refined and mapped to a set of work items that OGC member organizations will compete to address. The Innovation Program team, together with the Testbed sponsors, will then select the most qualified organizations to join Testbed-18. 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 any related standards and specifications.

Synergistic Effects

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

As multi-sponsor initiatives, Testbeds benefit from synergistic effects caused by overlapping interests. Sponsorship for individual tasks can be shared across sponsors, which enables the Testbed to explore new technology more deeply and ensures more realistic use cases and scenarios. The IP team collects the sponsors’ areas of interest early in the process and shares the full picture among all sponsors. This allows sponsors to identify common interests and leads to more efficient use of the available resources.

Testbed-18 addresses seven main topics (Tasks) categorized under three threads, as illustrated in the figure below:

Thread Summaries: 

Thread 1: Advanced Models and Data (AMD)

• 3D+ Data Standards and Streaming

For the first time, we look beyond earth and explore the sensor and object integration of assets in celestial orbits or in free flight in our solar system. With the growing commercialization of space, exact tracking and localization of data will become more and more important. This task develops the necessary reference system interoperability.The participants and their roles in this task are presented in the figure below:

• Machine Learning Training Datasets

Machine learning training datasets will help us understand how to standardize ML training data in order to guarantee the high quality of future ML models and compatibility. The Engineering Report name and its participants are presented in the following figure.

Thread 2: Catalogs, filtering, and Moving Features (CMF)

• Secure, Asynchronous Catalogs

Secure, asynchronous catalogs are a second contribution to open science environments. They address the current challenge with more and more data becoming available and the corresponding complexity with discovery and binding. The task components and their participants are presented in the figure below:

• Moving Features and Sensor Integration

Moving Features and sensor integration will lead to a robust framework of standards that enables interoperability for a wide spectrum of sensors, command and control systems, and analytical systems. The participants and their roles in this task are presented in the figure below:

Thread 3: Future of Open science and Building energy interoperability (FOB)

• Identifiers for Reproducible Science

The work on reproducible science is an important contribution to emerging Open Science Environments, as it makes scientific analysis and results reproducible. The participants and their roles are presented in the figure below:

• Building Energy Spatial Data Interoperability

Energy building spatial data interoperability allows us to explore interoperability within domains, where specific data and knowledge paired with established and emerging systems pose various challenges to interoperability and data integration. The topic is hotter than ever before with the current sky-rocketing energy prices. It addresses how to build robust platforms for a specific community that bridges all the way from raw data to decision-makers. The participants and their roles are presented in the figure below:

• Advanced Filtering of SWIM Feature Data

Testbed 18’s System Wide Information Management (SWIM) task explores filtering mechanisms for feature data served by OGC API-Features instances. The task components and their participants are presented in the figure below:

Call for Participation

Responses to the Call for Participation (CFP) were due in March for the Identifiers for Reproducible Science, Building Energy Spatial Data Interoperability, Advanced Filtering of SWIM Feature Data, Secure, Asynchronous Catalogs tasks; the deadline was in May for Machine Learning Training Datasets and Moving Features and Sensor Integration tasks; and the deadline was in July for 3D+ Data Standards and Streaming.   Copies of the CFP are available in HTML format and PDF format.

Testbed Kick-Off Agenda and Project Timeline

The following table is the schedule for the virtual kick-off meeting.

The Machine Learning Training Datasets and Moving Features and Sensor Integration kick-off meeting were held on 24 May 2022, and the 3D+ Data Standards and Streaming kick-off meeting was on 17 July 2022.

The following timeline highlights all the major milestones of Testbed-18.

Sponsoring Organizations

The following OGC Member organizations sponsored OGC Testbed 18. The sponsors provided interoperability requirements, use cases, and scenarios. They also provided cost-share funding as well as geospatial data as required to run the scenarios.

	Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl)
	European Space Agency (ESA)
	Natural Resources Canada (NRCan)
	Federal Aviation Administration
	National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
	US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Participating Organizations

The following organizations were selected as official Testbed 18 participants. Each participating organization had specific deliverables and tasks based on their responses to the Call for Participation.

Last updated 2023-01-25 17:51:49 +0100