March 14, 2017 -- The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has announced that the Kickoff Event for the Testbed 13 Innovation Initiative will be held on 4-6 April at USGS’ Headquarters in Reston, VA, USA.

The threads are sets of spatial interoperability requirements that will be addressed in the testbed to support the following:

• Cross Community Interoperability (CCI)
• Dynamic Source Integration (DSI)
• Earth Observation Clouds (EOC)
• Streaming & 3D Data (S3D)
• Compliance Testing (COT)

In OGC’s yearly testbeds, major sponsoring organizations work with leading technology providers to collaboratively define globally important spatial interoperability requirements that can be met through industry agreement on open standards and best practices.

Yearly OGC Testbeds are the principal activity of the OGC Interoperability Program and the main means by which the OGC membership, OGC’s testbed sponsors, and OGC’s partner standards organization have made spatial information an integral part of the world’s information infrastructure.

In a testbed’s planning phase, Sponsors and Participants define use cases and weave them into a scenario. Then the technology providers use a rapid prototyping process to develop and test candidate standards that enable successful and dramatic enactment of the scenario at the end of the testbed.

Shared investment in free and open spatial standards brings improved sharing and integration of spatial information, which has widespread and longstanding value for for society at large. Technology sponsors share the cost of developing - for their organizations and for the benefit of society - broadly useful interoperability innovations. Technology providers gain market exposure, market intelligence, and a chance to quickly take advantage of the business opportunities that arise with the introduction of new standards and associated technical capabilities.

At the April Kickoff Event, Testbed 13 Sponsors and OGC Staff will present the interoperability requirements and objectives for the five Testbed 13 threads listed above. OGC Staff will introduce the technology provider organizations who have been selected to work with the sponsors.

After 8 months of development work, in December of this year participating technology providers will demonstrate successful interoperability in all of the use cases in a dramatic demonstration based on the scenario. These Participants will deliver completed OGC Engineering Reports for public review and deliberation in the OGC Standards Program. The reports will become Discussion Papers, candidate OGC standards, revisions to existing OGC standards, or best practices for using OGC standards and related standards from other standards development organizations.

The deadline for cost-sharing proposals in response to the Testbed 13 Call for Participation (CFP) has passed, but any organization interested in providing only in-kind support may continue to offer proposals up through the beginning of the Kickoff event. Details surrounding the Testbed 13 technology threads and the entire Testbed 13 Architecture can be found in Appendix B of the CFP and in the CFP’s clarifications document.

Anybody wishing to learn more about this initiative can visit the Testbed 13 website at www.opengeospatial.org/projects/initiatives/testbed13. To learn more about the OGC Innovation Program in general, contact Scott Serich, Director, Innovation Program ( Email Contact) or visit www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/programs/ip.

About the OGC

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 525 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at www.opengeospatial.org.

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