OGC Disaster Pilot 2021: Call for Sponsors (CFS)

A disaster strikes, piling on to or cascading into additional disaster situations. Overwhelming, but preparation and coordination of scalable response capacity meets the challenge. Disaster relief forces from supporting jurisdictions quickly integrate and analyze vast streams of realtime data from multiple sources to monitor the evolving situation and plan their responses. Hybrid scalable cloud-based systems bring advanced AI processing, machine learning algorithms, and simulation models right to where earth observation and other data is already uplinked, prepared, and curated, generating analysis ready data with the characteristics, scale and speed that the complex situation demands. Convenience API’s, as well as edge computing devices and download-and-go geopackage containers and viewers, bring decision ready information directly to field workers' mobile devices even in resource-constrained, low-connectivity areas. Meanwhile, Web publication of "structured data" that link well-known content with up-to-the-minute situation observations enables search engines to push disaster-relevant information up in search results and help the public to stay on top of fast-moving events. All of this is possible through the preparation of technologies, geospatial standards, and data sharing arrangements that bring the right information at the right time to the right people in the right place.

There are many different kinds of disasters taking place all over the world, all the time, singly and in combination. Our current struggles, however, to address the combined effects of pandemic diseases such as COVID-19 and environment disasters such as floods, landslides, and wildfires do seem to be telling us that this is the challenge we should rise to. The OGC Disaster Pilot 2021 will be executed around a scenario that (so far) involves the detection and monitoring of flooding and landslides in a hard-to-access region of Peru, impacting populations already suffering from infectious disease epidemics and other health conditions. The response to this disaster scenario will leverage resources that are local, such as PeruSat-1 imagery and Peruvian first responders; regional, such those shared by AmeriGEO partners; and global, including Amazon Web Services and other cloud computing infrastructure.

The technical scope of the Pilot will revolve around a small set of significant technology trends and related standards:

There are a number of other trending technologies and standardization activities that could additionally be supported in order to investigate their potential to improve disaster response.

The Pilot scenario and technical scope described above clearly just begin to address the many serious challenges to effective disaster response, particularly in addressing the needs of end users, whether they be local officials, first responders, or the impacted populations themselves. Pilot sponsors will have the opportunity to provide additional inputs into the design of the activity with the potential to further improve the ability of key decision makers and responders to discover, manage, access, qualify, share, and exploit location-based information in support of disaster preparedness and response and multi-hazard risk analysis. Some additional ideas can also be found in the Disaster Pilot Prospectus

Here at the end of 2020, we can go to the moon and to mars, government agencies worldwide are producing huge streams of observation data, industry is innovating with remarkable analytics and AI tools, and yet common disasters like disease, flooding and wildfires are still creating almost unimaginable social and economic impacts. What is missing? A critical component is that these amazing systems still don’t talk to each other. The whole is less than, not greater than the sum of the parts. With the OGC Disaster Pilot 2021, the response community has the opportunity to put the puzzle pieces together that connect the right players from the data providers all the way to the first responders and the decision makers and everything in between, forming a pattern that can adapt to any disaster, any region, any combination of data sources and tools.

What OGC and its industry, government and academic members do is to make it easier and faster to fit those puzzle pieces to the pattern when needed, because the immense array of complex combinations of technological, architectural, standardization and operational requirements have been rigorously tested and documented in initiatives like the Disaster Pilot. It is both essential and central to the OGC mission

The OGC Innovation Program (OGC IP) is an innovative, collaborative, and hands-on engineering and rapid prototyping program. In the IP, OGC members bring forward technology and technology integration challenges. These challenges are refined and mapped to a set of requirements, use cases, and implementation scenarios and eventually addressed in different types of initiatives. These initiatives bring OGC vendors and research institutions together with sponsoring organizations. Coordinated and managed by the OGC IP Team, each initiative has the goal to stepwise increase Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) for geospatial IT solutions, including software architecture, interface design, information and data models, as well as related standards and specifications. Run globally, the Innovation Program further validates and tests geospatial technology based on OGC standards, identifies future OGC standardization work items, and builds know-how in applying existing standards to real world spatial data sharing challenges.

Interested in joining USGS, NASA, and AmeriGEO as a Pilot supporter? Please contact Director of Innovation Programs, Dr. Josh Lieberman, via the OGC Innovation Program contact form. The Disaster Pilot 2021 Call for Participation will be prepared in January 2021. If you are interested, please get in touch as soon as possible.

The following table details the major Pilot milestones and events.