OGC Testbed-16: Call for Participation (CFP)

The OGC Testbed is an annual research and development program that explores geospatial technology from various angles. It takes the OGC Baseline into account, though at the same time allows to explore selected aspects with a fresh pair of eyes. The Testbeds integrate requirements and ideas from a group of sponsors, which allows leveraging symbiotic effects and makes the overall initiative more attractive to both participants and sponsoring organizations.

This Initiative is being conducted under the OGC Innovation Program. The OGC Innovation Program 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 100 initiatives have taken place.

This initiative provides an outstanding opportunity to engage with the latest research on geospatial system design, concept development, and rapid prototyping. 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. This offers selected Participants a unique opportunity to recoup a portion of their initiative expenses.

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

The goals of the Aviation task in Testbed-16 are: to evaluate emerging architectural and technological solutions for the FAA SWIM services, and to advance further the usage of Linked data in information integration in the SWIM context.

The API modernization work shall evaluate solutions for data distribution that complement those currently used by FAA SWIM. Particular emphasis in this context shall be on OpenAPI-based Web APIs. OGC is busy developing Web APIs for the various geospatial resource types such as features, coverages, maps, tiles, and processes among others. There are many documented benefits for using Web APIs in the context of geospatial data retrieval and processing, including faster time to market for products, more flexibility in deployment models, and straight forward upgrade paths as standards evolve.

The linked data aspect shall explore the use and benefit of semantic web technologies in the context of FAA SWIM services. Linked data shall help querying and accessing all required data for any given task and help with the heterogeneous semantics introduced by the various ontologies and taxonomies used within the aviation community. These include for example the SWIM Controlled Vocabulary (SWIM CV), the Web Service Description Ontological Model (WSDOM), or semantics.aero.

Background

The System-Wide Information Management (SWIM) program, established and maintained by the FAA, supports the sharing of Air Trafic Management (ATM) information by providing communications infrastructure and architectural solutions for identifying, developing, provisioning, and operating a network of highly-distributed, interoperable, and reusable services.

As part of the SWIM architecture, data providers create services to access their data. For the FAA, these services are published in the NAS Services Registry/Repository (NSRR). NSSR is a catalog of all SWIM services and provides documentation on various aspects of each service, including its provider, functionality, quality characteristics, interface, and implementation.

One of the SWIM challenges is the handling of semantics across all participants. A diverse set of ontologies, controlled vocabularies, and taxonomies has been developed over the last decade. A good overview is provided in OGC 18-035.

The SWIM Controlled Vocabulary (SWIM CV) provides to SWIM organizations, support contractors, vendors, and business partners a uniform understanding of terms employed in the SWIM environment. The CV contains a comprehensive list of terms with clear and unambiguous definitions. Each term is globally uniquely identified by a dereferenceable URI so that it can be related semantically to other terms, vocabularies, or resources. SWIM CV is now part of semantics.aero.

semantics.aero is an open repository for use by the international aviation community to publish artifacts developed using Semantic Web technologies. Besides the SWIM CV, artifacts include taxonomies for classifying services by product type, availability, flight phase, ICAO region, etc. and are available in both human-readable (HTML) and machine-readable (RDF) versions.

The Web Service Description Ontological Model (WSDOM) is an ontology intended to be a basis for model-driven implementation of SOA-related artifacts. The ontology has been developed in Web Ontology Language (OWL) version 1.1; it consists of several files and is currently available in a single downloadable zip file. WSDOM can be considered an "RDF" realization of the Service Description Conceptual Model (SDCM). WSDOM standardizes information and metadata pertinent to describing SWIM services and facilitates interchange of service data between service providers and the FAA. The intent behind the ontology is to make service definitions clear, unambiguous, and discoverable by both humans and computer systems. WSDOM consists of ontology classes covering the key notions of service profile, service interface, service implementation, stakeholder, and document. WSDOM is patterned after the OWL-S semantic web services description ontology.

WSDOM was developed before SDCM and was written in OWL. For many people in the industry, OWL ontology was too technical to be understood by a large audience. To address this gap and make the service description more "readable", the Service Description Conceptual Model was created. That said, SDCM 2.0 is more recent than WSDOM 1.0, and therefore better reflects the current NSRR data structure. WSDOM 2.0 is currently being developed and not been aligned yet with the latest version of SDCM.