OGC publishes Testbed 10 Cross-Community Interoperability Engineering Reports

23 July 2014 – 24 public Engineering Reports resulted from the Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC®) recently completed OGC Interoperability Testbed 10 (OWS-10), the most recent in the OGC's yearly series of major geospatial interoperability testbeds. Six of these reports focused on Cross-Community Interoperability (CCI).

Use cases and scenarios provided by Testbed 10 sponsors defined the interoperability requirements. The Engineering Reports document the interoperability solutions developed by the testbed's technology provider participants. The reports describe work in progress on potential new standards and work done to validate candidate standards or to improve adopted standards. This information will be useful to implementors of OGC standards who are working on cross-community communication of location information in a broad range of application domains. OGC Engineering Reports do not, however, represent official OGC positions.

The six CCI Engineering reports document ways to increase Geospatial community interoperability in the areas of semantic mediation, volunteered geographic information (VGI), provenance and data quality, and Global Gazetteer. Much of this work in Testbed 10 built on work done in Testbed 9 (OWS-9).

The OGC Public Engineering Reports web page provides links to the reports. (Select “Date” in the table header to see the most recent reports listed first.) Some are still being edited and have not yet been posted.

This summary provides an example of the content of a CCI Engineering Report: Integration of data created using different naming schemas was one of the important themes in the CCI activity. The CCI Ontology Engineering Report reports on activities in Testbed 10 that were focused on semantic mediation approaches for data discovery, access and use of heterogeneous data models and heterogeneous metadata models. In particular, participants explored the creation of domain ontologies and tools to create, assemble, and disseminate geographic data provided voluntarily by individuals. The related CCI Virtual Global Gazetteer Engineering Report discusses the creation of domain ontologies and tools to create, assemble, and disseminate geographic data provided voluntarily by individuals.

Summaries of all the Testbed 10 Engineering Reports are available on the OGC Interoperability Testbed 10 (OWS-10) web page.

The sponsors of the upcoming OGC Testbed 11 testbed activity are reviewing the results of Testbed 10 and developing new sets of interoperability requirements to be addressed by Testbed 11's participating technology providers. OGC Testbed 11 requirements will undoubtedly include additional Cross-Community Interoperability requirements.

Contact the OGC to learn more about OGC Testbed 11 and how you might get involved as a sponsor or technology provider participant.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 475 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

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