OGC Disaster Pilot 2021: Call for Participation (CFP)

Building on the success and outcomes of the Disasters Resilience Pilot as well as other Innovation Program (IP) initiatives, OGC is now preparing to execute Disaster Pilot 2021. A key output from previous efforts has been recognition and acknowledgement of the need to address:

The vision of this initiative revolves around bringing the technological pieces together and increasing stakeholder engagement, in order to reduce the preparation time we can no longer afford, and accelerate our ability to transform data from observation into decision. This will require bridging the divides between providers, responders and other stakeholders, forming a connected ecosystem of data and technologies, and developing the capacity to produce DRI products that answer decision makers' questions almost as fast as they can be posed.

A disaster can be overwhelming, expected in some fashion but still unique in its details and progression, often piling on to or cascading into additional crisis situations. Preparation and coordination of scalable response capacity can, however, meet this challenge. Envisage that disaster relief forces from supporting jurisdictions quickly integrate and analyze vast streams of real time 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 (EO) and other data are already uplinked, prepared, and curated, generating ARD products with the characteristics, scale and speed that the complex situation demands. Convenience Application Programming Interfaces (API’s), as well as edge computing devices and download-and-go GeoPackage containers and viewers, bring DRI 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 details 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.

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

The Pilot mission is to develop capabilities and practices that are able to address the full cycle of disaster management across a wide range of hazards, including but not limited to:

In order to successfully implement and test critical technical and organizational aspects of the envisioned ecosystem, this CFP focuses on initial scenarios that address hazard early warning, monitoring, vulnerability assessment, disaster detection, impact awareness, and disaster response related to:

Initial scenarios will integrate social, economic, health, and environmental, and other information to address key indicators of risk, vulnerability, and impact identified by the sponsors. This information will directly influence the scope and nature of disaster and pandemic response activities.

Components and solutions implementing these initial scenarios are anticipated to be portable and scalable for testing and application by the sponsors and identified stakeholders in other geographic locations. Additional focus areas and natural hazards types (e.g. Droughts, Wildfires, Oil Spills) may be selected for follow-on scenarios by Pilot sponsors subject to availability of additional funding. Respondents to this CFP may address additional focus areas of interest in their responses, in order to inform potential development of follow-on Pilot activities.

While the objectives of an OGC Pilot are primarily technical, it is true that effective organizational and personal collaborations are just as important. In disaster management and response situations, physical analysis and synthesis centers have often been shown to foster critical exchanges of knowledge and effective plans for action, providing the rapid feedback loops required for timely decisions. The Pilot will include a series of workshops as well as other outreach activities intended to involve initiative stakeholders — sponsors, participants, and other collaborators — in designing and evaluating the technical capabilities that the Pilot will prototype. These activities will also be designed to model approaches to reproducing the impact of physical synthesis centers in a distributed environment by leveraging the sorts of virtual collaboration tools that have become both necessary and remarkably effective in recent times.

This Pilot 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 120 initiatives have been conducted. 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.

This Initiative provides a unique opportunity to work jointly with a full range of stakeholders, from EO data providers and relief organizations to field responders, towards the goal of applying standards-based geospatial IT solutions to real problems of marshaling coordinated, effective responses to complex disaster scenarios.

The outcomes are expected to shape the future of disaster management ecosystems through user-centric interoperability arrangements, identification of critical data sharing challenges and the delivery of cloud computing scale and agility to field personnel and relief organizations when and where they need it. Pilot sponsorship supports this vision with cost-sharing funds to largely offset the costs associated with development, engineering, and demonstration of these outcomes. This offers selected Participants a unique opportunity to recoup a significant portion of their initiative expenses.

The following table details the major Initiative milestones and events.

Disaster management frequently encounters key data sharing challenges that make present solutions more difficult, slower, and less effective than they could be:

Explore and advance geospatial standards-based solutions for improving disaster management by rapid prototyping and experimentation with Web APIs. Exercise discovery, virtual collaboration, dynamic integration of data from various sources, and connected-disconnected dissemination. Understand how structured data can help with search engine optimization and develop GeoPackage viewers that effectively support field operations in disaster management situations.

Previous work inside and outside of OGC has delineated cycles of activity phases involved in disaster management, all of which depend on getting the right information to the right people at the right time.

Within the longer term emergency management cycle are shorter term incident response phases for which the ability to move fast and adapt are particularly important. The implementation and testing of complete emergency management lifecycles is beyond the scope and timeframe of the current initiative; this Pilot will focus on a core set of short-fuse tasks leading up to and into incident response activities:

Support for these activities in the pilot will target landslide and/or flooding hazards affecting three river basins in two geographic regions:

Work in each target region will incorporate reporting and assessment of COVID-19 pandemic impacts on affected populations. This information will be used to influence the scope and nature of supported disaster response activities.

The following figure illustrates the pivotal points of interoperability (PPI’s) and user feedback loops that determine whether EO data can be effectively deployed to support disaster management and response.

These pivotal points have been identified as particular interoperability challenges for data sharing that successfully brings value from "eyes in the sky" to "feet on the ground". For this reason, the Pilot design is intended to test promising tools, technologies, standards, and collaborative strategies for addressing interoperability at these critical interchange points within the overall Pilot system. The figure illustrates not only the PPI’s controlling data flows, but also the common role of a search and discovery function to direct those flows, and corresponding user feedback / collaboration mechanisms that lead to selection and configuration of data flows most impactful for a particular disaster situation.

The following figure provides an overview of the component architecture to be implemented and tested during the pilot.

Almost all of the components in this ecosystem are to be implemented as a form of "As A Service (AAS)" virtual capability, whether infrastructure, data, information, application, or software. This design also recognizes that important EO and other data resources will generally be managed in more than one cloud or hybrid environment, requiring inter-cloud exchanges to support both application processing "close to the data" and ubiquitous cross-cloud search and discovery functions. In such an ecosystem, ubiquitous metadata is essential, represented by a Registry + Search component supported by metadata flow (red lines) between all of the other components. Other flows include raw data upload (gray), data flow (green), information flow (yellow) and application flow (blue or black).

The following figure presents user perspectives of the Pilot architecture that connect each user persona with the components / API’s / applications that constitute each user’s primary interface with that architecture. The six user personas are described in the table below. A critical element of successful disaster management is collaboration between stakeholders such as represented by these personas, both through sharing of data / information and through direct exchange of knowledge that leads to better ideas and actions.

The following figure focuses on identity and wiring of the individual components being solicited for this Pilot. In many cases, multiple components of the same type and role are being requested in order to demonstrate interoperability of multiple platforms and technologies, as well as to provide a data-rich ecosystem for generating effective information products.

Some of these components, such as EO data sources, will mostly be provided by Pilot sponsoring, supporting, and collaborating organizations. Other components are expected to be implemented primarily by selected participants, although some component instances may also be shared by sponsors, such as the Canadian Geospatial Platform (FGP). Except for mobile or pure desktop applications, all components are expected to leverage modern cloud platform architecture (i.e., infrastructure, data, information, and application/software services as well as community tools).

The following list identifies all document and component deliverables that are being sought to support the Pilot. All participants are required to participate in all technical discussions and support the development and testing of the overall Pilot system as well as the reports, videos, and other outreach activities with their contributions.

Documents

An Engineering Report which documents all work being executed, experiments conducted, analysis performed, the conclusions, and recommendations for future activities.

A guide for EO data providers, ARD product providers, DRI analysts, and other supporting stakeholders on how to prepare and coordinate with others in order to leverage standards-based cloud computing platforms in support of disaster management and response efforts.

An Engineering Report which documents using JSON-LD with OGC API’s to generate structured web page data for search engine optimization of disaster related information.

A guide for EO data users, relief organizations, field personnel, and other response stakeholders on how to prepare and coordinate with others in order to leverage standards-based cloud computing platforms in their disaster management and response efforts.

Components

Service(s) and associated application(s) supporting near-real-time registration, search, and discovery of ARD sources and decision ready information products (e.g., CCMEO’s Canadian Geospatial Platform cloud infrastructure, catalogues, online dashboards, push notifications, etc.). The data discovery component will also support discovery of contextual social-political-health datasets as well as local observations reported from impacted areas.

Cloud-based storage, processing, and service elements to support loading, preparation, and access to individual satellite-based observational datasets as well as other (e.g. demographic) datasets in forms suitable for analysis, visualization, and integration into decision ready information products.

Analysis application elements (processing, workflow, and associated functions) that can be deployed to cloud platforms near to source datasets and support agile, rapid, and scalable generation of decision ready (e.g. indicator) information products. These products will usually be based on pre-existing, well known and documented "recipes" but may also be developed on the fly as disaster situations and understanding, as well as data availability, unfold.

Component that draws from other Pilot components to generate and publish disaster-oriented web content that incorporates structured data, in order to make relevant and up-to-date decision ready information visible more prominently and specifically in major search engine results. This includes integrating OGC API services that provide such information with JSON-LD and aligning with schema.org in order to give a clear path for API resource content to be fully represented in web search engine indexes.

Data and services component that implements a model for pandemic health SDI information based on draft findings of the OGC Health SDI CDS to support addressing a COVID-19 disease pandemic that overlaps with environmental disasters such as landslides and/or flooding. The component shall interoperate with other Pilot components to collect health data from field personnel or other data sources, as well as provision health data for incorporation into information products that support field operations and health intervention decision making. Among the information components to be prototyped are identities and locations of health resources, such as health care facilities and major supplies. The component shall leverage standard identifiers such as GS1 GLN identification keys to accurately and consistently track these resources. The component shall also be evaluated for compatibility with Health SDI data provided by Pilot sponsors from a region of the United States.

Service and packaging elements deployed “near” to decision ready information products to make them discoverable and accessible to field application clients in environments of widely variable connectivity. This component shall support delivery of requested and/or subscribed information products as geopackages in order to address connected-disconnected operations.

Mobile client application able to discover, request, and download decision ready information products as geopackages in support of disaster response field personnel, operations, and decision making during connected-disconnected operations

Web / desktop client application able to interact with cloud based server components to discover, request, and download both ARD and DRI products for analysis and visualization by analysts and decision makers. The component shall also support virtual collaboration between distributed stakeholders both in the interpretation of such datasets, and in the design and selection of "recipes" for generation of decision ready information products. These "virtual fusion center" collaborations are expected to be mainly synchronous, but may on occasion require asynchronous interaction. Visualization approaches shall explore MapML implementations where possible.

Mobile applications (e.g., based on the CCMEO developed NRCan Observer application) and cloud-based server components providing access to decision ready information products and reporting / data collection capabilities for field operation support in disaster preparation, management, and response.

Infrastructure-As-A-Service offering able to elastically provision virtual host and container-based computing as well as file / object storage and Internet connectivity that supports dataflows both within that infrastructure and between distinct cloud infrastructures and providers.

The CFP consists of stakeholder role descriptions, proposal submission instructions and evaluation criteria, a master schedule and other project management artifacts, Sponsor requirements, and an initiative architecture. The responses to this CFP should include the proposing organization’s technical solution, cost-sharing requests for funding, and proposed in-kind contributions to the initiative.

Once the original CFP has been published, ongoing authoritative updates and answers to questions can be tracked by monitoring the CFP Corrigenda Table and the CFP Clarifications Table.

Bidders may submit questions via timely submission of email(s) to the OGC Technology Desk. Question submitters will remain anonymous and answers will be regularly compiled and published in the CFP Clarifications page.

OGC may also choose to conduct a Bidder’s question-and-answer webinar to review the clarifications and invite follow-on questions.

Following the closing date for submission of proposals, OGC will evaluate received proposals, review recommendations with the Sponsors, and negotiate Participation Agreement (PA) contracts, including statements of work (SOWs), with selected Bidders. Participant selection will be complete once PA contracts have been signed with all Participants.

The Kickoff is a virtual meeting (using GoToMeeting) where Participants, guided by the Initiative Architect, will refine the Initiative architecture and settle upon specific use cases and interface models 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 and confirm intended Component Interface Designs.

After the Kickoff, participants will meet on a frequent basis remotely via web meetings and teleconferences.

In the course of Pilot execution, two virtual workshops will be held to foster interchange and collaboration with stakeholders, including sponsors, supporters, participants, responsible government agency representatives, and inter- / non-governmental relief organizations. Participants will be required to take part in these workshops, the first of which will focus on critical data flows and indicators, while the second will bring together guidance for improved disaster readiness.

Development of Engineering Reports (ERs), Change Requests (CRs), videos, and other documentary deliverables will commence during or immediately after Kickoff.

Under the Participation Agreement (PA) contracts to be executed with selected Bidders, ALL Participants will be responsible for contributing content to project documents and videos, but the document Editors will assume the duty of being the primary document authors and coordinators.

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 the Demonstration Event and other stakeholder meetings.

Participants selected to implement service components are expected to maintain availability of both services and supported datasets for a period of no less than six months after the Participant Final Summary Reports milestone.

This initiative will be conducted under the following OGC Policies and Procedures.

The roles generally played in any OGC Innovation Program initiative include Sponsors, Bidders, Participants, Observers, and the Innovation Program Team ("IP Team"). Explanations of the roles are provided in Annex: Tips for New Bidders.

The IP 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. The Initiative Architect is responsible for scope and schedule control and will provide timely escalation to the Initiative Director regarding any severe issues or risks that happen to arise.

All activities in this Pilot will result in a Deliverable. These Deliverables can take the form of Documents, Implementations, and/or Videos.

Proposals are expected to be short and precisely addressing the work items a bidder is interested in. A proposal template will be made available. The proposal, including technical and financial details, has a page limit as defined in Appendix A. Details on the proposal submission process are provided in Appendix A: Proposal Submission Guidelines. The proposal evaluation process and criteria are described below.

Initiative participant business/contract representatives are required (per the terms in the Participation Agreement contract) to report the progress and status of the participant’s work. Detailed requirements for this reporting will be provided during contract negotiation. Initiative accounting requirements (e.g., invoicing) will also be described in the contract.

The IP Team will provide progress reports to Sponsors. Ad hoc notifications may also occasionally be provided for urgent matters. To support this reporting, each Pilot participant must submit (1) a Technical Progress Report and (2) a Business Progress Report. Both reports shall be delivered every second month by the first working day on or after the 4th of that month. Templates for both of these report types will be provided and must be followed.

The purpose of the Business Progress Report is to provide initiative management with a quick indicator of project health from the perspective of each Pilot participant. The IP Team will review action item status on a weekly basis with the Initiative participants assigned to complete those actions. Initiative participants must be available for these contacts to be made.

The following requirements apply to the proposal development process and activities.

The two documents that shall be submitted, with their respective templates are as follows:

A Technical Proposal should be based on the Response Template and must include the following:

The Cost Proposal should be based on the two worksheets contained in the Cost Proposal Template and must include the following:

Additional instructions are contained in the templates themselves.

Guidelines:

Once the original CFP has been published, ongoing authoritative updates and answers to questions can be tracked by monitoring this CFP.

Bidders may submit questions via timely submission of email(s) to the OGC Technology Desk. Question submitters will remain anonymous, and answers will be regularly compiled and published in the CFP clarifications table.

OGC may also choose to conduct a Bidder’s question-and-answer webinar to review the clarifications and invite follow-on questions.

Update to this CFP including questions and clarifications will be posted to the original URL of this CFP.

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