Request Open: January 24, 2025 12:00 am — February 8, 2025 6:59 pm (14 days left)
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is seeking information about technologies, platforms, and other resources that might be available for integration into the upcoming OGC Testbed-21 Initiative. The period for responses closes February 7.
The OGC Testbed series is an annual research and development program that explores geospatial technology while taking current and potential future OGC Standards into account. OGC Testbeds integrate requirements and ideas from different sponsors to maximize possible synergies and thus increase the efficiency of the work as well as sponsor ROI.
As the foremost community of the world’s leading geospatial IT experts, OGC uses these initiatives to connect sponsors with the most suitable participants. This offers a unique opportunity for sponsors and participants from a wide range of organizational sizes and locations to address their location data and processing challenges together.
OGC is releasing this Request for Information (RFI) to solicit information for the OGC Testbed-21 Initiative. This RFI is in preparation for an OGC Call for Participation (CFP), which will be released once the RFI responses are analyzed.
Emerging Topics
OGC’s Strategic and Principal members have highlighted the following topics as being of high interest for Testbed-21:
- Advancement of GeoDataCubes
- Analysis Ready Data
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Geoinformatics
- Building Blocks for Geospatial Ecosystems
- Citizen-centric data
- Digital Object Identifier (DOI) usage for geospatial resources
- GEOINT Imagery Media for ISR (GIMI)
- Integrity, Provenance, and Trust (IPT)
- Metadata and data infrastructures
- Policy and Standards
- Representation of triaxial bodies (e.g., asteroids, moons, comets) in the context of the solar system
- Semantics and data integration challenges
- Space Situational Awareness
Additional topics that have featured in recent discussions across the OGC that could also be investigated in Testbed-21 include:
- 3D data access and seamless 2D/3D/4D transitions
- Big Data Analytics
- Cloud-native geospatial
- Data-Centric Security
- Digital Twins
- Distributed data processing and data processing pipelines
- Event driven approaches and Publish/Subscribe workflows
- Feature extraction and modeling from Full Motion Video
- Federated Security
- Geospatial for the Metaverse
- High-Performance Geospatial Computing
- New Space
- OGC API Standards coordination effort and building of resource models
The Request For Information
The goal of this RFI is to aid in OGC’s understanding of the technological and other capabilities of potential Testbed-21 participants and how they could address the technical challenges identified by Testbed-21 sponsors.
The key objectives of the RFI are to help determine how OGC Staff should develop the Testbed and what organizations and components could be included, as well as what interconnections are missing or might need to be adapted. Additionally, the RFI will help OGC Staff understand which role or roles the respondent’s organizations could participate in.
The RFI takes the form of a Questionnaire designed to gather information from potential participants about their capabilities and interest in participating in Testbed-21. The responses will be gathered and assessed by OGC and potential sponsors. The inputs will aid in the design of the Testbed and the follow-on Call For Participation. There are no strict evaluation criteria as this RFI is to advance the design of the testbed itself, and respondents are not obligated to become participants.
If you are interested in influencing the design of our next Testbed Initiative, please fill out the Testbed-21 Request For Information Questionnaire. However, we recommend first downloading and reading the OGC Testbed-21 Request For Information document, which includes detailed background information, the current project timeline, instructions on how to submit any questions, a link to the RFI Questionnaire, and more.
Questions regarding the RFI should be submitted by January 29 at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth). Responses to the RFI Questionnaire are due February 7 at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth).
About OGC
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a membership organization dedicated to using the power of geography and technology to solve problems faced by people and the planet. OGC unlocks value and opportunity for its members through Standards, Innovation, and Collaboration. Our membership represents a diverse and active global community drawn from government, industry, academia, international development agencies, research & scientific organizations, civil society, and advocates.
Visit ogc.org for more information about our work.