OGC Open Science Persistent Demonstrator (OSPD) Initiative: Call for Participation (CFP)

The outcomes of the OSPD initiative will benefit not only its sponsors and direct Participants, but the broader stakeholder community through:

This Initiative is currently a strategic initiative between ESA and NASA and sponsored by them. It incorporates requirements and ideas from these sponsors, including facilitating the use of their data, services, and systems, together with platforms and data from the wider ecosystem. We welcome and encourage further organizations to become sponsors of this initiative to fund and drive requirements as the architecture matures, as well as to engage as participants through this Call for Participation.

As the architecture develops and sponsors provide more advanced requirements, and as providers and users submit new requirements and requests, the focus and priorities of the OSPD will adapt to reflect these changes. In collating input from stakeholders, OGC’s consortium of experts will ensure that OGC remains a neutral forum to solve issues leveraging the power of geospatial, and delivering open and consensus-based solutions that move at the rapid pace of innovation.

This initiative provides an outstanding opportunity for Participants to connect with stakeholders across the ecosystem, engage with the latest research on geospatial system design, concept development, and rapid prototyping with government organizations (Sponsors) across the globe. The initiative provides a business opportunity for participants to mutually define, refine, and evolve service interfaces and protocols in the context of hands-on experience and feedback. The outcomes are expected to provide a “lab” type system to test capabilities prior to operational adoption and shape the future of geospatial software development and data publications. The Sponsors are supporting this vision with cost-sharing funds to partially offset the costs associated with development, engineering, and demonstration of these outcomes. This offers selected Participants a unique opportunity to recoup a portion of their initiative expenses. OGC COSI Program Participants benefit from:

The OGC welcomes proposals to participate in its Initiatives from organizations and individuals active in the development, management, and use of geospatial data, technologies and systems. Proposers may be active in industry, government (national, regional, local), research, non-profit, community, or other sectors. Past participants have included providers of services and platforms, modelers, end users of platforms and data, researchers, and other stakeholders in relevant domains.

You do not need to be a member of the Open Geospatial Consortium to propose to participate. If your organization’s proposal is selected, you or your organization must become an OGC member if not already one. This is to ensure all participants have equal access to the tools and documentation developed and shared throughout the project phase.

The OSPD is designed to enable interested organizations to participate in a range of ways, from simply engaging in the co-design process without committing any resources other than the participant’s time, to providing funding, in-kind or paid services, or providing a resource such as a dataset or access to infrastructure. Key mechanisms for engagement include:

Collaborative Open Science and FAIR data are widely recognized as critical tools for taking advantage of the opportunities created through addressing complex social and environmental challenges. To date, many millions have been invested in hundreds of initiatives to enable access to analytical tools, provide data management, data integration and exchange, translate research results, and support reproduction and testing of workflows for new applications. These investments have resulted in a plethora of new data, protocols, tools and workflows, but these resources frequently remain siloed, difficult to use, and poorly understood, and as a result they are falling short of their full potential for wider impact and their long term value is limited.

The OSPD Initiative, through its design, development and testing activities, asks:

While each proposal should include information on planned contributions, it is anticipated that these proposals do not exceed 5 pages unless necessary to indicate participation in multiple sections. The following diagram outlines all activities (grey boxes), work items (colored boxes), and deliverables (Dxxx) in this initiative. Bidders may submit bids for individual work items or any combination of work items.

Responding to the Call For Participation (CFP):

To respond to the CFP as a bidder, you will submit an Online Form in which you describe your proposal. This proposal should include your (the bidder’s) technical solution(s) for each deliverable, cost sharing request(s) for funding, and proposed in-kind contribution(s) to the initiative.

The CFP includes a description of the deliverables against which bidders may submit proposals. Bidders may address technical deliverables, such as implementing a component of an infrastructure, or participatory deliverables, such as contributing to meetings and to writing documents. The timeline for completion of the deliverables is set out in the Master Schedule.

Proposal Evaluations will take place on a per-deliverable basis. Therefore, it is important that all proposals should all be entered into the form on a per-deliverable basis.

Proposals in response to the CFP should be submitted by the deadline listed in the Master Schedule.

Questions and Requests for clarification: Bidders have the opportunity to submit questions about the CFP for an initial Q&A Webinar. Questions can be submitted using this Form. Bidders who cannot access the Form should send an email to ospd-questions@ogc.org. The Bidders Q&A Webinar will be held on the date listed in the Master Schedule. The webinar is open to the public, but anyone wishing to attend must register using the provided link. Questions are due on the date listed in the Master Schedule Question submitters will remain anonymous, and answers will be compiled and published in the CFP clarifications.

After the initial Q&A Webinar bidders may submit further questions using the same Form. Again, question submitters will remain anonymous. Ongoing updates and answers to questions will be added to the CFP Corrigenda Table and the CFP Clarifications Table. The HTML version of the CFP will be updated automatically and appear at the same URL as the original version. The PDF file online will be updated following each revision. You should download a new copy for offline work regularly to ensure you are referring to the latest version.

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

Required attendance at the Kickoff: The Kickoff is a meeting where Participants, guided by the Initiative Architect, will refine the Initiative architecture and settle on specifics 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 intended interface Designs.

Required attendance at Regular Telecons and Meetings: After the Kickoff, participants will meet frequently via weekly telecons (videoconferencing) and in person at OGC Member Meetings. As a minimum, participants are required to attend virtual meetings regularly.

Requirements for Development of Deliverables: Development of Components, Engineering Reports, Change Requests, and other deliverables will commence during or immediately after the Kickoff meeting.

Under the Participation Agreement contracts, ALL Participants will be responsible for contributing content to the documents / ERs, particularly regarding their component implementation experiences, findings, and future recommendations. Each participant will be required to provide at least one bullet point per week to the ER on work, progress, technical conversations and decisions, etc., while the ER Editor will be the primary compiler and author on the shared sections such as the Executive Summary. The ER editor is further responsible for capturing all design decisions and lessons learned during the whole initiative execution phase. Compiling the whole report at the end of the initiative does not work!

More detailed deliverable descriptions appear under Types of Deliverables.

Final Summary Reports, Demonstration Event and Other Stakeholder Meetings: Participant Final Summary Reports will constitute the close of funded activity. Further development work might take place to prepare and refine assets to be shown at webinars, demonstration events, and other meetings.

Assurance of Service Availability: Participants selected to implement service components must maintain availability for a period of no less than twelve months after the Participant Final Summary Report milestone.

This initiative will be conducted within the policy framework of OGC’s Bylaws and Intellectual Property Rights Policy ("IPR Policy"), as agreed to in the OGC Membership Agreement, and in accordance with the OGC COSI Program Policies and Procedures and the OGC Principles of Conduct, the latter governing all related personal and public interactions. Specifically:

Several key requirements are summarized below for ready reference:

The roles generally played in any OGC COSI Program initiative include Sponsors, Bidders, Participants, Observers, and the COSI Program Team. Explanations of the roles are provided in 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. They are responsible for scope and schedule control, and will provide timely escalation to the Initiative Director regarding any high-impact issues or risks that might arise during execution.

All activities in this pilot will result in a Deliverable. These Deliverables generally take the form of a persistent demonstrator capability, Documents or Component Implementations.

Engineering Reports (ER) and Change Requests (CR) will be prepared in accordance with OGC published templates. Engineering Reports will be delivered by posting on the (members-only) OGC Pending directory when complete and the document has achieved a satisfactory level of consensus among interested participants, contributors and editors. Engineering Reports are the formal mechanism used to deliver results of the COSI Program to Sponsors and to the OGC Standards Program for consideration by way of Standards Working Groups and Domain Working Groups.

Document content should follow this OGC Document Editorial Guidance (scroll down to view PDF file content). File names for documents posted to Pending should follow this pattern (replacing the document name and deliverable ID): OGC OSPD24 DocumentName (D001). For ERs, the words Engineering Report should be spelled out in full.

Proposals are expected to be brief, broken down by deliverable, and precisely addressing the work items of interest to the bidder. Details of the proposal submission process are provided under the General Proposal Submission Guidelines.

Proposals will be evaluated based on criteria in two areas: technical and management/cost.

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.

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. The general initiative objective is to inform future OGC standards development with findings and recommendations surrounding potential new specifications. 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 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 COSI 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 the delivery of their work. 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 found in the CFP Corrigenda Table and the CFP Clarifications Table

Bidders may submit questions using the Questions Form or by emailing ospd-questions@ogc.org. When using the form, bidders should check ‘COSI (Innovation)’ from the list of ‘Interests’ and write the Initiative for which they are bidding and their question in the ‘Message’ box. Question submitters will remain anonymous, and answers will be regularly compiled and published in the CFP clarifications.

A Bidders Q&A Webinar will be held on the date listed in the Master Schedule. The webinar is open to the public, but anyone wishing to attend must register using the provided link. Questions are due on the date listed in the Master Schedule.

The process for a Bidder to complete a proposal is set out in the online Bid Submission Form.

The Bid Submission form will be made available shortly after the CFP release. It will include a series of web forms, one for each deliverable of interest. Bidders should remember to submit one form for each deliverable for which they wish to submit a proposal.

New users must create an account before completing a form.

Once an account is established, the user may log in and will be taken to a home page indicating the "Status of Your Proposal." 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.