OGC Disaster Pilot 2023: Call for Participation (CFP)

Building on the success and outcomes of Disaster Pilot 2021 and other Collaborative Solutions and Innovation Program (COSI) initiatives, OGC is now preparing to execute Disaster Pilot 2023. A key output from previous efforts has been recognition and acknowledgement of the need to address:

The vision of this initiative revolves around bringing the technological pieces together and increasing stakeholder engagement, in order to reduce the preparation time we can no longer afford, and accelerate our ability to transform data from observation into decision. This will require bridging the divides between providers, responders and other stakeholders, forming a connected ecosystem of data and technologies, and developing the capacity to produce Decision Ready Indicator (DRI) products that answer decision makers' questions almost as fast as they can be posed.

A disaster can be overwhelming, expected in some fashion but still unique in its details and progression, often piling on to or cascading into additional crises. It can also be subtle, slowly advancing in cases such as drought and changing climate. Preparation and coordination of adaptive, scalable collaboration capacity has the potential to meet this challenge. Envisage that disaster relief forces from supporting jurisdictions quickly integrate and analyze vast streams of real-time data from multiple sources to monitor the evolving situation and plan their responses. They can do this partly because they have already been doing this, to maintain awareness of months-long and years-long challenges such as drought, wildland fire fuel build-up, and changing climate.

From anywhere in the world, scalable cloud-based systems bring advanced AI processing, machine learning algorithms, and simulation models to where Analysis Ready Data (ARD) earth observation (EO) and other data products are already uplinked, prepared, and curated. Convenience Application Programming Interfaces (API’s), as well as elastically deployable cloud-backed applications, make available customized DRI products with the characteristics, scale and speed that the situation complexity and scope demands, targeted directly to field workers' mobile devices even in resource-constrained, low-connectivity areas. Simultaneously, observations, reports, and decision-making needs contributed by those same workers as well as the public complete a real-time collaboration loop, continuously improving the quality and relevance of the information provided to them on which to decide and act.

The Pilot’s technical scope involves a key set of stakeholder collaborations, distributed information technologies, EO advancements, and related standards:

The Disaster Pilot’s on-going mission is to develop capabilities and practices to address the full cycle of disaster management across a wide range of individual and combined hazards, including but not limited to:

In order to successfully implement and test critical technical and organizational aspects of the envisioned ecosystem, this CFP focuses on initial limited-complexity scenarios that address collaborative hazard preparation, mitigation, monitoring, vulnerability assessment, disaster detection, impact assessment, and disaster response related to:

Initial scenarios will integrate EO, social, economic, health, environmental, and other information to address key indicators of risk, vulnerability, and impact identified by the sponsors and stakeholders. This information will directly influence the scope and nature of disaster response activities.

Drought with its resulting low moisture levels in soils, vegetation, and the atmosphere, is a disaster in its own right. Recurring or prolonged drought is also a significant factor in other hazards from crop failure to loss of drinking water. As a slowly developing and diffuse disaster, though, it presents different challenges for awareness, resilience, and response even as some of its consequences such as wildland fires are much faster moving. The proposed Wildfire + Drought Pilot program will seek to prototype sharing of ARD and model workflow outputs that connect drought trends in time and space with patterns of wildland fires and other risks and consequences across the province of Manitoba as well as the western United States from the Denver area to California, Texas, North Dakota, and so on. It will also look at communicating, in the form of collaboratively developed DRI, those combinations of risk and vulnerability where the right emergency management personnel need to take the right action in time for effective wildland fire resilience.

The proposed pilot program will leverage partnerships developed within the OGC Disaster Stakeholder Coordination Group as well as with other national and local organizations. Partners will be brought into collaborations with data providers, analysts, and modeler participants to define and build data sharing workflows through two workshop events and the development of a collaboration environment for national engagement. The workflow "recipes" will combine EO-derived input variables with drought and wildfire risk tracking models to produce indicator products able to guide practitioners toward greater wildfire and drought awareness and more effective decision making. A cloud-based information ecosystem will be developed and demonstrated that leverages OGC Environmental Data Retrieval (EDR), API Processes, and other standardized interfaces to facilitate discovery and access for both ARD and DRI products, realizing a prototypical digital ecosystem for evidence-based decision making.

The impact of these information products rests on several factors including accuracy, timeliness, and relevance to disaster management, but above all on the insights that they provide. To this end, the pilot will develop an initial 3D/4D spatial data framework (including water related features such as high-resolution hydrography and topography) along with an immersive 4D visualization environment, in order to provide a compelling context within which ARD and DRI products can be experienced and interpreted. The Pilot will deliver documentary outputs in the form of engineering reports, guides, and change requests to OGC standards, a persistent demonstrator capability in the form of documented data-driven indicator workflows, and 4D immersive visualization capabilities.

This project will explore and demonstrate how geospatial standards can improve geospatial drought and wildland fire information interoperability. While improvement of disaster management outcomes will be central to the Pilot, as an OGC activity it will concurrently explore the refinement and adoption of geospatial standards and demonstrate a complete standards-based information flow solution from data creation to consumable product delivery. Outcomes from this project will improve our ability to understand the disastrous consequences of drought, such as wildland fires, and the geospatial data required for better decision-making, collaboration, and policy development to manage drought. This will include evaluating gaps within current policy and providing recommendations for how policies relating to drought and wildland fire management can be implemented to leverage geospatial standards-based interoperability frameworks.

While many of the objectives of an OGC Pilot are technical, effective organizational and personal collaborations, as well as social, economic, and political context, are just as important. In disaster management and response situations, physical analysis and synthesis centers have often been shown to foster critical exchanges of knowledge and effective plans for action, providing the rapid feedback loops required for timely decisions. The Pilot will include a series of workshops and other outreach activities intended to involve initiative stakeholders — sponsors, participants, practitioners, and other collaborators — in designing, exercising, and evaluating the technical capabilities that the Pilot will prototype. These activities will also examine approaches to reproducing the effectiveness of physical synthesis centers in a distributed environment by leveraging virtual collaboration tools that have become both necessary and remarkably effective in recent times.

This Pilot is being conducted under the OGC Collaborative Solutions and Innovation Program. OGC Innovation provides a collaborative, agile process for solving geospatial challenges. Organizations (sponsors and technology implementers) come together to solve problems, produce prototypes, develop demonstrations, provide best practices, and advance the future of standards. Since 1999 more than 120 initiatives have been conducted. Coordinated and managed by the OGC Innovation Team, each initiative aims to stepwise increase Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) for geospatial Information Technology (IT) solutions, including software architecture, interface design, information and data models, as well as related standards and specifications. Run globally, the Innovation Program further validates and tests geospatial technology based on OGC standards, identifies future OGC standardization work items, and builds know-how in applying existing standards to real world spatial data sharing challenges.

This Initiative provides a unique opportunity to work jointly with a full range of stakeholders, from EO data providers and relief organizations to field responders, towards the goal of applying standards-based geospatial IT solutions to real problems of marshaling coordinated, effective responses to complex disaster scenarios.

The outcomes are expected to shape the future of disaster management ecosystems through user-centric interoperability arrangements, identification of critical data sharing challenges and the delivery of cloud computing scale and agility to field personnel and relief organizations when and where they need it. Pilot sponsorship supports this vision with cost-sharing funds to largely offset the costs associated with development, engineering, and demonstration of these outcomes. This offers selected Participants a unique opportunity to recoup a significant portion of their initiative expenses.

The following table details the major Initiative milestones and events.

Disaster management frequently encounters key challenges in sharing and collaborating over data that make present awareness solutions more complex, slower, and less effective than they could be:

Previous work inside and outside of OGC has delineated multiple cycles of activity phases involved in disaster management, all of which depend on getting the right information to the right people at the right time …​ about the right times and places.

Within the longer-term risk management and emergency management cycles are shorter term incident response phases for which the ability to move fast and adapt is particularly important. DP21 focused on supporting these shorter-term activities such as:

Disaster Pilot 2023 will expand its focus to activities across a wider range of timescales, such as adaptation and planning, both because drought and wildland fires occur on very different timescales, and to support the balancing of resources between immediate and longer-term needs which is also relevant to resilience in the face of broader climate change effects.

Solutions developed through Disaster Pilot 2023 will address ways in which many different organizations (e.g. governments at all levels, industry) with diverse skill sets, data, and offerings can come together together to support a disaster response, over both short (e.g. days to months) and long-term (e.g. years) periods. How can emergency management organizations clearly understand organizational expertise, toolsets, data and product offerings, etc. to determine their roles in a disaster event, and determine how to best deploy them?

Support for these activities in the pilot will target drought and wildland fire hazards affecting two geographic regions:

The following are brief descriptions of specific architectural viewpoints that embody Pilot objectives and provide guidance for the design of proposed workflows, components, and applications, as well as interactions between components, stakeholders, and other workflow components.

Given limited time and resources, it is important to focus efforts on improving interoperability on critical connections where a lack of interoperability is particularly likely to derail data sharing. The following figure illustrates several pivotal points of interoperability (PPI’s, orange arrows pointing to red starred interfaces) and user feedback loops (blue arrows) that determine whether EO-derived variables and other data can be effectively deployed to support disaster management and response.