OGC Testbed-20: Call for Participation (CFP)

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a worldwide community of over 550 experts from industry, government, research, and academia who collaborate to make geospatial (location) information and services more accessible and usable. OGC Testbeds are annual research and development initiatives investigating geospatial technology from various perspectives. They consider the OGC Baseline while exploring selected aspects with broad teams from industry, government, and academia. These initiatives aim to advance the principles of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) and OGC’s open Standards capabilities. Testbeds bring together requirements and ideas from a group of sponsors, leveraging symbiotic effects and making the overall initiative more appealing to participants and sponsoring organizations.

OGC’s Standards development process is member-driven and creates royalty-free, publicly available, and open geospatial standards. OGC is always at the forefront, actively analyzing and anticipating emerging tech trends. OGC’s Innovation and Collaborative Solution Program is an agile, collaborative Research and Development (R&D) lab that builds and tests innovative prototype solutions to members' use-cases. The global OGC Community engages in various activities related to location-based technologies, including developing consensus-based open Standards and best practices, collaborating on problem-solving in agile innovation initiatives, participating in member meetings, events, and workshops, and more. OGC’s standards development process moves at the pace of innovation, with constant input from technology forecasting, practical prototyping, real-world testing, and community engagement.

This initiative is being conducted under the OGC Collaborative Solutions and Innovation (COSI) Program, which aims to solve the biggest challenges in location. OGC members come together to solve problems, produce prototypes, develop demonstrations, provide best practices, and advance the future of standards. Since 1999, more than 200 funded initiatives have been executed, from small interoperability experiments run by an OGC working group to multi-million dollar testbeds with more than four hundred OGC-member participants. OGC COSI initiatives promote rapid prototyping, testing, and validation of technologies, such as location standards or architectures, which not only encourages rapid technology development but also determines the technology maturity of potential solutions and increases the technology adoption in the marketplace.

This initiative provides an outstanding opportunity to 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 stakeholders to mutually define, refine, and evolve service interfaces and protocols in the context of hands-on experience and feedback. The outcomes are expected to shape the future of geospatial software development and data publication. The Sponsors are supporting this vision with cost-sharing funds to partially offset the costs associated with development, engineering, and demonstration of these outcomes, offering selected Participants a unique opportunity to recoup a portion of their initiative expenses. OGC COSI Program Participants benefit from access to funded research & development, reduced development costs, risks, and lead-time of new products or solutions, close relationships with potential customers, first-to-market competitive advantage on the latest geospatial innovations, influence on the development of global standards, partnership opportunities within our community of experts, and broader market reach via the recognition that OGC standards bring. Exceptional demonstrators may be selected for ongoing support and public showcasing beyond the Pilot period (see Miscellaneous).

The following table details the major Initiative milestones and events. Dates are subject to change.

In the world of Resilient Data Services, one of the major challenges is maintaining the availability, Integrity, Provenance, and Trust (IPT) of data across different endpoints, particularly in distributed systems where data services might not always be available or may need to change their access points depending on environmental conditions. It is crucial to ensure that a re-available endpoint is trustworthy and that data integrity and provenance are maintained throughout its lifecycle to establish a resilient architecture.

This becomes even more important as data services must be adaptable to climatic impacts, and therefore require strong integration, interoperability, and continuous monitoring. Current methodologies need to incorporate agile reference architecture (ARA) models that follow FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) to effectively manage and use data across diverse and fluctuating networks.

The Next Generation ISR Imagery Standards (NGIIS) initiative is a forward-looking effort aimed at fundamentally transforming the standards for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) imagery. Part of this initiative is the development of the GEOINT Imagery Media for ISR (GIMI), encapsulated within NGA Standard 0076. Pronounced "gimmie," GIMI is designed to revolutionize how still and motion imagery is managed, integrated, and utilized across various defense and intelligence platforms.

The GIMI Standard integrates advanced media standards such as the ISO/IEC 14496-12 ISO Base Media File Format (ISOBMFF) and the ISO/IEC 23008-12 High Efficiency Image File Format (HEIF). This integration will enable a unified container for both Still and motion imagery, significantly enhancing interoperability and access across platforms. Key features of GIMI include robust security metadata, precise geopositioning, and a globally-unique content identifier system. These capabilities are essential for modern ISR operations and are poised to allow GIMI to replace older systems like the National Imagery Transmission Format (NITF), setting the stage for it to potentially become the new standard within NATO operations.

In October of 2023, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Code Sprint was held in the UK, with GIMI being one of the event’s main focuses. The event showcased the draft GIMI Profile (2023 Open Standards Code Sprint Summary Engineering Report), which proved to be a dependable container for GEOINT data within the OGC ecosystem. This confirmation established GIMI as a robust option for future applications.

Looking ahead, Testbed-20 is set to further the development and implementation of the GIMI standards, with a focus on cloud-optimized capabilities. The Testbed-20 activities will cover multiple aspects of the GIMI development process, from standardization and tool development to software support and documentation of gained knowledge.

The community has invested significant resources into Geospatial Data Cubes (GDC), highlighting a commitment to creating infrastructure conducive to the organized storage and use of multidimensional geospatial data. While progress has been made, the state-of0the-art falls short of fully interoperable GDCs capable of meeting specific organizational requirements. Establishing reference implementations to ensure GDCs are both interoperable and exploitable, particularly in Earth Observation (EO) contexts, remains a priority.

Born out of the collective efforts of the OGC Testbed-19 (draft Engineering Report is available here) initiative and GeoDataCube SWG, the GDC Draft API strives to unify the disparate threads of geospatial data cube technology. By integrating elements from the openEO API, OGC API-Processes, and SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC), the GDC draft API presents a holistic approach to accessing, managing, and processing Earth Observation data.

The draft GDC API standard addresses the critical need for Analysis Ready Data (ARD) by offering robust solutions to handle heterogeneous, multi-dimensional geospatial datasets seamlessly. This capability is vital for organizations and researchers dealing with large volumes of Earth observation and environmental data, enabling them to extract meaningful insights efficiently. As GeoDataCube continues to evolve, it aims to set the standard for geospatial data cube technologies, pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved with geospatial analytics.

This Testbed-20 task aims to support the GDC draft API by developing a language-independent approach to using GDCs in workflows (e.g. OGC API-Processes, OpenEO, CWL). This approach should allow workflows and processes to be interchangeable regardless of the language used to create them. This task also encompasses the design and execution of a structured usability test for a use-case that implements GDC-API draft Standard in a realistic operational setting. This test should involve a community of end-users, assembled by the User Testing participant, and the results should be provided in a report with recommendations for improvements. Participants can choose the specific method for conducting the usability tests, e.g. workshops, paper-based exercises). Additionally, a GDC API demonstrator will be developed and documented to exchange information on data sources (i.e. metadata) and provenance information (i.e. processing steps, algorithms, specifications) for a GeoDataCube in both open science and non-disclosed workflows.

OGC’s approach towards cloud-native geospatial ecosystems includes advancing data encoding standards such as COG for tiled rasters and GeoZarr for data cubes. GeoParquet will complement these by making vector datasets easily accessible from the cloud.

This effort will explore options for how GIMI files should be organized to support the efficient extraction of payload content. Initially, this work should focus on the example provided by COG. HTTP protocols, such as the HTTP Range Request (RFC 9110) could be coupled with a tiled image pyramid (overviews) payload structure to access client-selected content. That content, and only that content, would be downloaded. Thereby obviating the need to transfer the entire file.

Additional efforts can be focused on asynchronous protocols such as MQTT Publish-Subscribe and streaming. Using these protocols, changes to the client-selected content would trigger a notification. The client would then be free to download that content as discrete tiles or as a stream of pixels.

The following parameters apply to this subtask:

Results from this effort should be used to define the payload portion of the Testbed-20 GIMI Specification.

The Testbed-20 GIMI Specification will also define “core” metadata for GIMI as well as the data architecture and techniques needed to extend that core in a manageable fashion. This core metadata should support common discovery and location metadata as well as the metadata required to support payload optimization, as described above. It must also be “future-proofed”. Capable of supporting all current missions and extensible enough to adapt to most future missions.

It’s not just overhead: Many imaging sensors are not overhead. They are hand-held, vehicle-mounted, or have a highly oblique field of view. The GIMI metadata must be able to locate an image without ground coordinates for its four corners.

It’s not just about pictures: Many “imaging” collections are not intended for human viewing. These are coverages. ^[1] Collections of measurements organized in a regular or sometimes irregular grid. Examples include hyperspectral (chemical signatures) and Sensor Independent Complex Data (phase shift and amplitude). These collections may be used to produce human viewable pictures, but their primary consumer is software analytics. Support to exploit this non-imagery data must be provided in the GIMI “imagery” metadata.

Promote commonality: Other OGC imagery standards also define metadata models to augment existing non-OGC imagery standards (GMLJP2, GeoTIFF, etc.). There have been sporadic attempts to harmonize across these models, but the installed base has made these efforts impractical. GIMI, however, does not have a large installed base. This is an opportunity to develop an imagery metadata model which is a conceptual and functional superset of the existing OGC imagery metadata models. Specifically, Testbed-20 should consider GMLJP2 (as recommended by the Code Sprint), GeoTIFF, Observations and Measurements, and the Semantic Sensor Network Ontology (SSN). In the interest of future-proofing, change requests under consideration for these standards should also be included.

Development of the Testbed-20 GIMI Specification requires a means to quantify the performance and quality impact of the design options. The development of executable benchmarks which are accurate and repeatable is essential to completing that task. In addition, such benchmarks would prove valuable to implementors who, faced with a collection of options, will want to select the option most suitable for their requirements. Therefore, this subtask will develop those benchmarks and propose their incorporation into the OGC Compliance and Interoperability Test Environment (CITE).

Since Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF and GIMI have overlapping capabilities, these benchmarks should be capable of performing apples vs. apples comparisons between COG and GIMI implementations.

The recommended approach for this topic is as follows:

The lessons learned from this effort will be captured in a Best Practices document for the purpose of guiding implementors of GeoTIFF and GIMI on the most effective solution for their specific requirements.

Compare the performance of cloud-optimized GIMI file interaction versus COG or other competing formats. Where possible, compare capabilities on an even basis in terms of capabilities and extensibility of the format, cost, availability of tools, open source versus commercial tools, compute platforms, etc.

Identify software tools, libraries, and applications required to support each format. Determine and document requirements for cloud applications. Determine and document requirements for client applications.

The following resources are relevant to this task.

The use-cases of this task are based on the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) requirements. ECMWF is an intergovernmental organization whose main responsibility is operational numerical weather prediction (NWP). ECMWF runs 4 operational forecast cycles per day, consisting of one high-resolution deterministic forecast and a 51-member ensemble forecast. The high-resolution deterministic forecast provides the best guess of the future atmospheric conditions, and forecasts to 10 days ahead. The ensemble forecasts are perturbed forecasts representing the uncertainty in the known state of the atmosphere and model parameterization. They are used to create probabilistic forecasts, and typically forecast up to 15 days ahead.

The users of this data are national weather services, commercial users, and the general public. A large portion of ECMWF data is served as Open Data. All forecast data output is also archived in the Meteorological Archival and Retrieval System (MARS), which currently contains over 400PiB of meteorological data.

As well as operational forecasts, ECMWF also conducts research and is involved in projects such as Copernicus and Destination Earth, which all produce data which is curated for semantic storage and access in the same systems.

All data at ECMWF, whether operational or research, is stored and accessed using a semantic data modelling language (the MARS language). The entirety of the data is addressed as a single, multi-dimensional datacube. The granularity of the datacube is two-dimensional global fields, where each field is represented on a grid (e.g., octahedral, HEALPix, ORCA).

The objective of this use-case is to enable users to visualize combined datacubes, coming from both meteorology and earth observations, over a certain area.

There will be three main challenges inherent in this use-case:

There will be three main challenges inherent in this use-case: * In contrast to the Data Visualization use-case, where data alignment is not crucial, it is of utmost importance here. Since the ECMWF data is not on a standard latitude-longitude grid, aligning the data and using some form of interpolation will be necessary for processing between the layers.

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.

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 testbed will result in a Deliverable. These Deliverables generally take the form of Documents or Component Implementations.

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.

Participants will be required to report the progress and status of their work; details will be provided during contract negotiation. Additional administrative details such as invoicing procedures will also be included in the contract.

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.

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. The general testbed 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 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 Testbed-20 CFP Questions Form. 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 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.

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

The following table identifies all corrections that have been applied to this CFP compared to the original release. Minor editorial changes (spelling, grammar, etc.) are not included.

The following table identifies all clarifications that have been provided in response to questions received from organizations interested in this CFP.

Please use this convenience link to navigate to the end of the table.

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