15 May 2014 -- The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has issued a call for sponsors for the 11th annual OGC location standards innovation testbed. Sponsors of OGC testbeds provide requirements, use cases, business cases and funding to support fast-paced prototyping of international spatial interoperability standards and best practices. Prospective sponsors - public and private sector organizations dependent on accurate and timely information about things in time and space - are invited to both of these OGC Testbed 11 planning events:

•  OGC Testbed 11 Sponsor Planning Meeting to be held from 1000-1200 EDT on 29 May 2014 via GoToMeeting and phone dial-in. Register for this free virtual meeting here.
• OGC Testbed 11 Sponsor Planning meeting to be held from 9000-1000 CEST 12 on June 2014 during the OGC Technical Committee (TC) meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. Register here.

Early expressions of interest in Testbed 11 have come from technology users and technology providers in Smart Cities, Aviation, Law Enforcement, Emergency Management, Energy and Utilities, Climate, and Consumer Apps. By pooling requirements and resources, sponsors – at very little cost – can make significant contributions to technology domains such as big data analytics, open data, social-location networking, modeling & simulation, Points of Interest, linked data, mobile location services, and the Internet of Things.

Many interoperability challenges remain and the OGC's Testbed 11 is wide open to new players and new topics. Technology advancement is a balance of “first movers” with innovative applications and common infrastructure based on established standards.  Between the extreme states of chaotic innovation and frozen standards lies the evolutionary process of OGC Interoperability Program. The OGC’s Testbed process is a proven approach for testing new emergent functions for end users while providing risk reduction for developers of technology innovation.

OGC Testbed 11 will build on the outcomes of prior OGC initiatives. The recent OGC Testbed 10 (OWS-10) yielded and demonstrated advances in these areas:

Aviation:  Advanced use of aviation and flight information model data (AIXM, FIXM) and weather model data (WXXM) in an event-driven dynamic environment with visualization of Digital "Notices to Airmen" (NOTAMs) in an integrated client.

Cross-Community Interoperability (CCI): Advances in semantic mediation, volunteer geographic information (VGI), provenance and data quality, and Global Gazetteer.

Open Mobility: Support for mobile client applications dependent on services and big data that are distributed across cloud infrastructures. Showed how GeoPackages can be created by means of a OGC Web Processing Service using imagery annotations, consistent with the US National Information Exchange Model (NIEM).

Results from OGC testbeds are documented in free and publicly available OGC Engineering Reports.

Do you have all the open APIs and common encodings you need to design architectures for your extended enterprise? Would you like to pay only a small fraction of the costs of having an international team of experts prototype those APIs and encodings?

Will your specific requirements be addressed by the standards that come out of the OGC and the OGC's many Standards Development Organization (SDO) partners in the next year or two? They will be addressed if someone in your industry represents your requirements in the appropriate SDO testbeds and working groups.

More about the Testbed 11 Sponsor Meeting
Participation in the 29 May Testbed 11 planning meeting does not constitute a commitment to sponsor OGC Testbed 11. Sponsor and participant commitment will be part of a subsequent Request for Quotation / Call for Participation (RFQ/CFP) process. The OGC also welcomes the participation of other Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs), as SDOs' cooperation and SDO members' cross-participation are necessary to avoid overlapping work programs and future obstacles to interoperability. OGC's many active alliances with other SDOs ensure that OGC standards are harmonized with the international Information Technology (IT) standards stack.

For more information about Testbed 11, send email to info[at]opengeospatial.org.

Join two other webinar to learn about results of OGC Testbed 10 (OWS-10)
Interested organizations are also invited to attend two free OGC Testbed 10 webinars:

OGC Testbed 10 Aviation Thread Webinar – 27 May 2014, from 1000 to 1130 EDT.

OGC Testbed 10 Cross-Community Interoperability (CCI) and Open Mobility Threads Webinar – 28 May 2014, from 1000 to 1130 EDT.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 475 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. Visit the OGC website at  http://www.opengeospatial.org/.