Climate and Disaster Resilience Pilot 2024.2: Call for Participation (CFP)

The OGC welcomes proposals to participate in its initiatives from organizations and individuals active in developing, managing, and using 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. However, if your organization’s proposal is selected, you or your organization must become an OGC member if you are not already one. This ensures all participants have equal access to the tools and documentation developed and shared throughout the project phase.

The CDRP24.2 is designed to enable interested organizations to participate in various ways. Every organization is invited to submit a proposal for the work items and deliverables defined in this Call for Participation, but other forms of participation also exist. These range from simple involvement in the co-design process without resources other than the participants' time, providing funding, in-kind contributions, paid services, or providing resources such as data sets or access to infrastructure. Mechanisms for engagement include:

The green and digital transition is a core political priority of the European Commission, unveiled by a flagship action plan, the European Green Deal, which is supported by different legislative and regulatory actions. Several of these actions are expected to make a concrete contribution to climate mitigation, climate adaptation, or the prevention of environmental degradation (biodiversity preservation, zero pollution). In this context, efficient and no-barrier access to data and services from different domains that can be further combined and processed to leverage actionable and truthful information, will be the cornerstone to achieving the objectives.

Various data stores, data access services, and platforms have been developed to support the European Green Deal agenda. Among these are the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS) with the Early Warning Data Store (EWDS), the ECMWF Common Data Store (E-CDS), which supports the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), the Copernicus Data and Information Access Services (DIAS) WEkEO, which provides combined access to Copernicus Environmental Services and Sentinels together with computing and storage resources, the Destination Earth Digital Twins Engine, or the Green Deal Data Space (GDDS). Recently, additional systems have been developed on top of these components, such as the Copernicus Thematic Hub for Health (implemented by CAMS) and Thematic Hub for Energy (implemented by C3S).

This broad ecosystem will require trusted and secure platforms for accessing and sharing high-value environmental data, empowering policymakers, businesses, researchers, and citizens from Europe and worldwide to tackle the achievement of the EU Green Deal objectives jointly. An unveiled ecosystem of data and services will be essential to address climate change’s potential and actual economic impacts and related disaster and emergency situations.

The system architecture is designed as a distributed system and an open framework that provides web-based and API-based retrieval facilities for a vast catalog of datasets and other digital information. All components adopt the FAIR principles, in which OGC Standards play a pivotal role. By supporting standardized interfaces, the various components can be integrated efficiently and securely, as well illustrated by WEkEO.

EUMETSAT, Mercator Ocean, EEA, and ECMWF implement the WEkEO Data and Information Access Service (DIAS) platform. The WEkEO platform allows users to allocate computing and storage resources, develop experiments in a Jupyter environment, and combine different Copernicus data sources, such as the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS), the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS), or the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (CEMS). ECMWF Data Stores and WEkEO have complementary capabilities and present functional interlinkages - WEkEO regularly harvests the shared data store catalogs and other configuration files as interactive forms and constraints. The Data Store’s technical components “power” the data access via the Harmonized Data Access (HDA) API, and ECMWF toolkits such as “earth kit” or “ClimateLab” are fully compatible with deploying and running on WEkEO allowing users to access, manipulate and visualize data across different services. This close interaction is fostered by adopting FAIR principles on all sides, relying to a large degree on adopting OGC and other international or de facto community Standards across infrastructure components and interfaces.

As part of its modernization, Data Stores set up an ARCO (Analysis Ready, Cloud Optimized) Data Lake with additional services. A series of ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) workflows continuously updates this ARCO data lake containing sub-sets of data chunked by spatial and geographical dimensions. ARCO data is exposed via standard WMTS Services and consumed primarily by the WEkEO viewer but is publicly open for further consumption. These ARCO capabilities are expected to offer new functional possibilities in the future, which are particularly important for the promotion of responsive visual and interactive applications or AI/ML solutions.

Along with the modernized data stores, ECMWF has launched “earthkit”, an open-source Python project providing tools for weather and climate workflows that simplify data access, analysis, and visualization. Earthkit packages are optimized to integrate with Data Stores and WEkEO platforms but can deploy and run everywhere and interact with external data sources and Python libraries.

All these components, platforms, and tools represent building blocks and foundational resources for the envisioned environmental ecosystem, contributing data, services, and infrastructure resources. Improved findability and data access capabilities will enable organizations to build novel transdisciplinary applications and drive innovation that integrates multiple sectors.

This pilot shall showcase, evaluate, and enhance the FAIRness and level of compliance with the standards of the various components with a focus on the data stores and the WEkEO platform. The goal is to explore new, innovative, and more demanding ways of accessing data and services. This pilot shall implement scenarios that feature multi-platform data integration, responsive visual interactive applications, and ML/AI solutions.

The insurance sector can be critical in making communities more climate and disaster-resilient. The risks, hazards, and impacts of disasters change as the climate alters, so communicating new information to a broad audience is essential. Today, the ability to convey accurate, relevant information and respond to questions about increasingly frequent, intense coastal floods and wildfires and their impacts on communities is a priority. A key area of interest for the insurance sector, shared by government agencies sponsoring the CDRP, is the development of trustworthy Large Language Models (LLMs) that may be used to communicate information about the impacts of climate change and associated risks.

The information needed for LLMs to answer questions on these topics is found in many formats, from mentions of places in proximity to one another in written documents to maps depicting the locations of built structures to structured spatial data generated from surface water absorption forecasts. Consequently, it is necessary to enable LLMs to access data and information represented spatially (maps, data visualizations) and textually (documents, attributes, descriptors). While methods to enable LLMs to use textual information are developing rapidly, the specific challenges of extracting a range of spatial data from text, maps, and other spatial representations are less advanced.

The potential of LLMs to improve both the creation and communication of spatial information relevant to climate-driven hazards like coastal flooding and wildfire has been demonstrated. Prior work (e.g., Bokoyo et al. arXiv:2311.04929) illustrates the use of fine-tuned LLMs to improve the accuracy of spatial information extracted in response to a well-engineered prompt, as well as the use of spatial data to improve model tuning. While progress has been made, this is an active research area, and open questions include:

This task uses elements from the previous task and complements these with additional research.

Spatial data and information derived from commercial, civilian government, and NGO sources are increasingly used by entities within the Defense/IC community, including in their activities in support of natural disaster response and emergency management. Conversely, declassified data and information, including imagery, are used by commercial, civilian government, and NGOs for their applications in support of disaster resilience. Recent developments such as the US National Unclassified Data Lake underscore the importance of these cross-community efforts. To facilitate the flow of information between the systems used by commercial, civilian government, and NGO applications and those used by DoD/IC organizations for emergency and disaster management, interoperability between ontologies used to structure information relationships within DoD/IC information infrastructures and metadata supplied by current data retrieval processes, including standards-conformant APIs, by civilian and commercial communities should be maximized.

The DoD/IC uses the Common Core ontology and extensions relevant to emergency and disaster management, including the Atmospheric Feature Ontology, Hydrographic Feature Ontology, and Sensor Ontology to structure their information and facilitate discovery of relevant content. The OGC community has developed API standards, e.g. the OGC API-Features standard and the OGC EDR-API standard, to improve the interoperability of services and applications, including those relevant to emergency and disaster management, and facilitate FAIRness including data discoverability, query, and transfer.

The following table provides an overview of all deliverables to be provided. Due to specific requirements of the sponsors, some services can only be awarded to organizations based in a Copernicus member state. In principle, however, all organizations can apply for each deliverable on an in-kind basis.

Not all contracts between the OGC and the sponsors have been signed yet. For this reason, some work items are marked with "funding status pending" in the following table. It is expected that all listed work items will be funded. However, this cannot be guaranteed at this time.

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.

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.

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 / Engineering Reports (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.

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 Q&A Form. Bidders who cannot access the Form should send an email to email address: "innovation at 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 Q&A 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.

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.

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. 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.