1. Introduction

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is releasing this Call for Participation (CFP) to solicit proposals for the OGC Testbed-18. The Testbed-18 initiative will explore six tasks, including advanced Interoperability for Building Energy; Secure, Asynchronous Catalogs, Identifiers for Reproducible Science, Moving Features and Sensor Integration, 3D+ Data Standards and Streaming, and Machine Learning Training Data.

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1.1. Background

OGC testbeds are an annual research and development initiative that explores geospatial technology from various angles. They take the OGC Baseline into account, and at the same time explore selected aspects with a fresh pair of eyes. 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.

1.2. OGC Innovation Program Initiative

This initiative is being conducted under the OGC Innovation Program. This 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 110 initiatives have taken place.

1.3. Benefits of Participation

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.

1.4. Master Schedule

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

Table 1. Master schedule
Milestone Date  Event

M01

07 February 2022

Release of CFP.

M02

18 February 2022

Questions for CFP Bidders Q&A Webinar due.

M03

24 February 2022

Bidders Q&A Webinar to be held 10:00-11:00 EST.

M04

31 March 2022

CFP Proposal Submission Deadline (11:59pm EST)

M05

25 April 2022

All testbed Participation Agreements Signed. OGC will start sending preliminary offers to conduct negotiations no later than March 23.

M06

3-5 May 2022

Kickoff Workshop held as a virtual meeting on May 3-5, May 24, and July 17.

M07

15 June 2022

Initial Engineering Reports (IERs).

M08

June 2022 (specific date TBD)

IER presentations at the Member Meeting.

M09

30 September 2022

Technology Integration Experiments (TIE) component implementations completed & tested; preliminary Draft Engineering Reports (DERs) completed & ready for internal reviews.

M10

31 October 2022

Ad hoc TIE demonstrations & Demo Assets posted to Portal; Near-Final DERs are ready for review; WG review requested.

M11

18 November 2022

Final DERs (incorporating internal and WG feedback) posted to pending to meet the 3-week-rule before the technical committee (TC) electronic vote for publication.

M12

15 December 2022

Last deadline for the final DER presentation in the relevant WG for publication electronic vote.

M13

16 December 2022

Last deadline for the TC electronic vote on publishing the final DER.

M14

31 December 2022

Participants' final summary reports are due.

M15

17 & 18 January 2022

Outreach presentations at an online demonstration event.

2. Technical Architecture

This section provides the technical architecture and identifies all requirements and corresponding work items. It references the OGC standards baseline, i.e. the complete set of member approved Abstract Specifications, Standards including Profiles and Extensions, and Community Practices where necessary.

Please note that some documents referenced below may not have been released to the public yet. These reports require a login to the OGC portal. If you don’t have a login, please contact OGC using the Additional Message textbox in the OGC Innovation Program Contact Form.

Testbed Threads

The Testbed is organized in a number of tasks. For organizational purposes, related tasks are handled in threads. Each thread combines a number of tasks that usually share architectural or thematic aspects. Threads allow us to keep related work items closely together.