WAYLAND, Mass. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — April 17, 2009 — The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. OGC® announces the reopening of a Request For Quotations and Call for Participation (RFQ/CFP) to solicit proposals for the Empire Challenge 09 Pilot (EC09 OGC Pilot) that was originally posted in December 2008 and then withdrawn for lack of funding.

Limited funding has now been authorized to accomplish one of the objectives during the EC09 demonstration this July. The sponsor and the OGC are soliciting proposals that provide working services that implement the OpenGIS® Sensor Alert Service (SAS) Best Practice Document on several networks. Responses are due by April 27, 2009 and the Pilot Kickoff Meeting will be the first week of May near Washington, DC. Technology deployments will be complete by July 17, 2009, followed by a two-week demonstration.

The EC09 OGC Pilot will examine the suitability and performance of the SAS specification for providing alerts. Details on the extent of this request, contact information, and the original EC09 OGC Pilot RFQ/CFP documents can be downloaded from: http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/56. The original documents are to be used to understand the environment of the EC09 demonstration.

Interested parties are encouraged to submit proposals. However, due to the lateness of funding and the EC09 schedule, priority will be given to respondents that already have accredited OGC standards based systems solutions on the classified networks to be served: the SIPR net, the Coalition Forces Network for the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and an unclassified Community of Interest (COI) network at the event site in China Lake, CA. The sponsor will work with non-accredited selectees to process the needed documents for one or more of these networks.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 370 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OpenGIS® 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 http://www.opengeospatial.org/.

Contact:

Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
Sam Bacharach, +1 703-352-3938
Executive Director, Outreach
Email Contact