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.

These pivotal points have been identified as interoperability challenges for data sharing that successfully bring value from "eyes in the sky" to "feet on the ground". For this reason, the Pilot design is particularly intended to test promising tools, technologies, standards, and collaborative strategies for addressing interoperability at these critical interchange points within an overall Pilot ecosystem. The figure illustrates not only the PPI’s controlling data flows, but also the common role of a search and discovery function to direct those flows, and corresponding user feedback and collaboration mechanisms that lead to the selection and configuration of workflows most impactful for a particular disaster situation.

The PPI’s shown in this diagram apply to each individual workflow but particularly to opportunities for sharing components and data between workflows in an overall information ecosystem.

The following figure presents user and stakeholder perspectives of the Pilot architecture that connect each user persona with the components / API’s / applications that constitute each user’s primary interface with the overall system. Six user personas are described in the table below as a representative subset of all significant stakeholders. A critical element of successful disaster management is collaboration between stakeholders such as represented by these personas, both through sharing of data / information, decision on useful indicator recipes, and through direct exchange of knowledge that leads to better ideas and actions.

The following figure provides an overview of the information flow architecture expected to emerge from multiple workflows implemented, deployed, optimized, and tested during the pilot.

Almost all of the components in this ecosystem are to be implemented as a form of "As A Service (AAS)" virtual capabilities in a common Pilot sandbox cloud environment if possible, whether the components implement data access, information processing, or applications. In some cases, independent existing and persistent cloud datastores or services such as AWS Public Data, Copernicus, or GeoGLoWS may be used. In such a diverse and emergent ecosystem, standardized interfaces and ubiquitous metadata are essential, the latter supported for Pilot purposes by a catalog / registry component. In the wider operational ecosystem, it will be even more critical that metadata for each component / dataset be created and maintained with that product (e.g. as Spatiotemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) indices) so that it can be harvested as needed by multiple search / navigation facilities.

Potential sharing and interchange of component elements that make up each implemented workflow are to be supported by equipping each of those elements with standard input, output, and control interfaces, as well as providing for them to be registered in the D100 catalog-registry component. This does not guarantee that interchange and sharing will occur but does increase the chances that such synergies will be possible. Shown here is also the possibility that processing may occur close or far from data, in the cloud or on premises, or as some hybrid of these. Workflows components may still be chained and interchanged under these circumstances, particularly with the help of standard API’s. Timeliness and scale, however, are usually best served by processing in cloud environments "close" to where the most extensive input datasets are stored.

The following list identifies all document and component deliverables that are being sought to support the Pilot. All participants are required to participate in all technical discussions, support the development and testing of the overall Pilot ecosystem, and contribute appropriately to reports, videos, demonstrators, and other outreach activities.

Documents

An Engineering Report which documents all work being executed, experiments conducted, analysis performed, the conclusions, and recommendations for future activities.

Comprehensive updates of the user and providers readiness guides produced in Disaster Pilot 2021, based on experiences and feedback after their initial publication for:

An Engineering Report which provides guidance on taking the capabilities and lessons learned from Disaster Pilot 2023 and building capacity for decision-ready indicator workflows into disaster management operations. This guidance should incorporate:

The report should be able to serve as a resource for development of training materials to support disaster management and first responder personnel.

Components

Service(s) and associated application(s) supporting near-real-time registration, search, and discovery of ARD data sources, DRI workflows, and DRI-focused applications. The component will also support discovery of and access to geospatial framework datasets, contextual social-political-health data and crowd-sourced / volunteered observations from impacted areas. The component will support both synchronous request-response and asynchronous publish-subscribe-notify interactions. The component will also support harvesting of ARD and DRI metadata to support other federated disaster information data platforms.

Workflow Components D101-D110

Each of the following workflow deliverables use OGC EDR, OGC API Processes, cloud-native data access, and other standardized interfaces to consume ARD ingredients and provide current as well as predictive and historical indicators as a service for the Pilot study areas. The workflows with their constituent components and datasets must be registered and discoverable through Component D100. Each workflow is to include at least a simple user interface / application as well as support through standard API’s user interactions supported by Components D111 and D112 and other user applications. User interfaces or applications are to be selected and/or designed with input from representatives of targeted end users. Each workflow will be deployed as a persistent demonstrator on common cloud infrastructure and should include distinct elements that may be shared or exchanged with other Pilot workflows as appropriate. Specific indicator recipes implemented by each workflow are to be proposed by the workflow provider but then refined and finalized for Pilot use in consultation with stakeholders during initial stages of the Pilot. Generated indicators are not intended to be comprehensive but to serve as exemplars of the capability of standards-based workflow tools and practices to develop the right guidance at the right time for the right stakeholders.

Implemented workflow to produce one or more indicators of drought severity.

Implemented workflow to produce one or more indicators of drought impact on crop health and production.

Implemented workflow to produce one or more indicators of drought impact on freshwater availability.

Implemented workflow to produce one or more indicators of drought impact on energy production. This may include hydroelectric plant operation, cooling water for other energy facilities, dust effects on solar power, groundwater effects on geothermal energy production, and other significant impacts.

Implemented workflow to produce one or more indicators of the health status impacts of drought on affected populations.

Implemented workflow to produce one or more indicators of fuel-type availability [with appropriate latecy - e.g. fire managers require a fuel status update at least every 6 months] and suitability [e.g. fuel moisture status, proximity to infrastructure] affecting the risks of wildland fire occurrence, severity, and spread

Implemented workflow to produce one or more indicators of wildland fire ignition risk in the Pilot study areas. Indicators may also include detection of significant fire onsets. Respondents may wish to refer to the following NASA White Paper for more detailed information on ignition risk formulation.

Implemented workflow to produce one or more indicators of wildland fire prescribed burn priority in support of prescribed burn planning and logistics that balance (for example) wildfire risk reduction against fire control risks.

Implemented workflow to produce one or more indicators of need, priority, timing, and/or routing for population evacuation in the face of wildland fire risks and/or occurrences.

Implemented workflow to produce one or more indicators of the impact of wildland fires (naturally occurring and/or prescribed) on the health status of affected populations.

Component able to consume indicator products from Pilot workflows as well as framework and contextual data discoverable through component D100 in order to provide users with an immersive, interactive visual experience of the information, both to support disaster management operations and to improve general comprehension of the multiple spatial-temporal scales at which multiple hazards, vulnerabilities, and disaster occurrences need to be managed now and in the future.

Cloud-based, cloud-deployable application-as-a-service offering able to elastically provision mobile application instances scaled and configured to support first responders and other practitioners dynamically in specific disaster situations.

Component to demonstrate how field-collected survey information (e.g. from the QGIS Q-Field application) can be interoperably shared with an OGC API Features - Part 4 (Transactions) service. A potential scenario includes collecting photos of a drought/wildfire activity with Q-Field and sharing the photo and its associated geographic coordinates with first responders, analysts, or other disaster parties.

The CFP consists of deliverable documents, components, and capabilities; stakeholder role descriptions, proposal submission instructions and evaluation criteria, a master schedule and other project management artifacts, Sponsor requirements, and an initiative architecture. The responses to this CFP should include the proposing organization’s technical solution, cost-sharing requests for funding, proposed in-kind contributions to the initiative. Responses should also include plans for activities to involve stakeholder representatives in technical solution development and testing.

Once the original CFP has been published, ongoing authoritative updates and answers to questions can be tracked by monitoring the CFP Corrigenda Table and the CFP Clarifications Table.

Bidders may submit questions via timely submission of email(s) to the OGC Technology Desk. Question submitters will remain anonymous and answers will be regularly compiled and published in the CFP Clarifications page.

OGC may also choose to conduct a Bidder’s question-and-answer webinar to review the clarifications and invite follow-on questions.

Following the closing date for submission of proposals, OGC will evaluate received proposals, review recommendations with the Sponsors, and negotiate Participation Agreement (PA) contracts, including statements of work (SOWs), with selected Bidders. Participant selection will be complete once PA contracts have been signed with all Participants.

The Kickoff is a meeting (using GoToMeeting) where Participants, guided by the Initiative Architect, will refine the Initiative architecture and settle upon specific use cases and interface models to be used as a baseline for prototype component interoperability. Participants will be required to attend the Kickoff, including breakout sessions, and will be expected to use these breakouts to collaborate with other Participants and confirm Component API agreements in order to facilitate potential data sharing and component interchange.

After the Kickoff, participants will meet on a frequent basis remotely via web meetings and teleconferences.

In the course of Pilot execution, two workshops will be held to foster interchange and collaboration with stakeholders, including sponsors, supporters, participants, responsible government agency representatives, and inter- / non-governmental relief organizations. Participants will be required to participate in at least one of the workshops.

Workflow components (data access, processing, user application, etc.) provided by participants are required to be made available for deployment in containerized form to a common cloud computing environment for persistent demonstration and interchange experiment purposes. This requirement is waived for already deployed common data sources and services such as Copernicus which are considered openly available for use in any workflow.

Development of Engineering Reports (ERs), Change Requests (CRs), videos, and other documentary deliverables will commence during or immediately after Kickoff.

Under the Participation Agreement (PA) contracts to be executed with selected Bidders, ALL Participants will be responsible for contributing content to project documents and videos, but the document Editors will assume the duty of being the primary document authors and coordinators.

Participant Final Summary Reports will constitute the close of the funded activity. Further development work might take place to prepare and refine assets to be shown at the Demonstration Event and other stakeholder meetings.

Participants selected to implement workflows are expected to maintain the deployability of supporting components and datasets for a period of no less than six months after the Participant Final Summary Reports milestone.

This initiative will be conducted under the following OGC Policies and Procedures.

The roles generally played in any OGC Innovation initiative include Sponsors, Bidders, Participants, Observers, Stakeholders, and the Innovation Team ("COSI Team"). Explanations of the roles are provided in Annex: Tips for New Bidders.

The COSI Team for this Initiative will include an Initiative Director and an Initiative Architect. Unless otherwise stated, the Initiative Director will serve as the primary point of contact (POC) for the OGC.

The Initiative Architect will work with Participants and Sponsors to ensure that Initiative activities and deliverables are properly assigned and performed. The Initiative Architect is responsible for scope and schedule control and will provide timely escalation to the Initiative Director regarding any severe issues or risks that happen to arise.

All activities in this Pilot will result in a Deliverable. These Deliverables can take the form of documents, implementations, demonstrations, and videos, as well as other collaboration and outreach activities.

Proposals are expected to be short and precisely address the work items a bidder is interested in. A proposal template will be made available. The proposal, including technical and financial details, has a page limit as defined in Appendix A. Details on the proposal submission process are provided in Appendix A: Proposal Submission Guidelines. The proposal evaluation process and criteria are described below.

Initiative participant business/contract representatives are required (per the terms in the Participation Agreement contract) to report the progress and status of the participant’s work. Detailed requirements for this reporting will be provided during contract negotiation. Initiative accounting requirements (e.g., invoicing) will also be described in the contract.

The COSI Team will provide progress reports to Sponsors. Ad hoc notifications may also occasionally be provided for urgent matters. To support this reporting, each Pilot participant must submit (1) a Technical Progress Report and (2) a Business Progress Report. Both reports shall be delivered every second month by the first working day on or after the 4th of that month. Templates for both of these report types will be provided and must be followed.

The purpose of the Business Progress Report is to provide initiative management with a quick indicator of project health from the perspective of each Pilot participant. The COSI Team will review action item status on a weekly basis with the Initiative participants assigned to complete those actions. Initiative participants must be available for these contacts to be made.

This section presents general guidelines for submitting a CFP proposal. Detailed instructions for submitting a response proposal using the Bid Submission Form web page can be found in the Step-by-Step Instructions below.

Proposals must be submitted before the deadline indicated in the Master Schedule, 17 February 2023.

Bidders responding to this CFP must be organizational OGC members familiar with the OGC mission, organization, and process.

Proposals from non-members or individual members will be considered provided that a completed application for organizational membership (or a letter of intent) is submitted prior to or with the proposal.

The following screenshot shows the Organizational Background page:

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. Once a Bidder has agreed to become a Participant, they will be required to release proposal content (excluding financial information) to all initiative stakeholders. Sensitive information other than labor-hour and cost-share estimates should not be submitted.

Bidders will be selected for cost share funds on the basis of adherence to the CFP requirements and the overall proposal quality. A general initiative objective is to inform future OGC standards development, implementation, and adoption with findings and recommendations. Each proposed deliverable should formulate a path for (1) producing executable interoperable prototype implementations meeting the stated CFP requirements and (2) documenting the associated findings and recommendations. Bidders not selected for cost share funds may still request to participate on a purely in-kind basis.

Bidders should avoid attempts to use the initiative as a platform for introducing new requirements not included in the Technical Architecture. Any additional in-kind scope should be offered outside the formal bidding process, where an independent determination can be made as to whether it should be included in initiative scope or not. Out-of-scope items could potentially be included in another OGC IP initiative.

Each selected Participant (even one not requesting any funding) will be required to enter into a Participation Agreement contract ("PA") with the OGC. The reason this requirement applies to purely in-kind Participants is that other Participants will likely be relying upon their delivery. Each PA will include a Statement of Work ("SOW") identifying specific Participant roles and responsibilities.

Once the original CFP has been published, ongoing updates and answers to questions can be tracked by monitoring the CFP Corrigenda Table and the CFP Clarifications Table

Bidders may submit questions using the Additional Message textbox in the OGC Innovation Program Contact Form. Question submitters will remain anonymous, and answers will be regularly compiled and published in the CFP clarifications.

A Bidders Q&A Webinar may be held (a date will be announced and listed in the Master Schedule). The webinar is open to the public, but anyone wishing to attend must register using the provided link. Questions will be due prior to the Q&A Webinar.

The process for a Bidder to complete a proposal is essentially embodied in the online Bid Submission Form. Once this site is fully prepared to receive submissions (soon after the CFP release), it will include a series of web forms, one for each deliverable of interest. A summary is provided here for the reader’s convenience.

For any individual who has not used this form in the past, a new account will need to be created first. The user will be taken to a home page indicating the "Status of Your Proposal." If any defects in the form are discovered, this page includes a link for notifying OGC. The user can return to this page at any time by clicking the OGC logo in the upper left corner.

Any submitted bids will be treated as earnest submissions, even those submitted well before the response deadline. Be certain that you intend to submit your proposal before you click the Submit button on the Review page.

The following requirements apply to the proposal development process and activities.

Bidders who are new to OGC initiatives are encouraged to review the following tips: