3 September 2020: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced a new initiative that will focus on defining and prototyping a Health Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) based on community use cases, business and technical requirements. The Health SDI will use the latest geospatial and IT technologies, and be guided by the FAIR principles of making location information Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. The resulting Health SDI will aim to serve as a Pandemic Early Warning, Response & Recovery Platform. Expressions of interest for sponsorship are due by September 22, 2020. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the world that global crisis response and preparedness cannot be executed without location-related information about people and resources. There is now a critical requirement for trusted information-sharing not only between stakeholders from traditional sources, such as health, defense, and public safety, but also those with new sources of information, such as the location data collected through smartphones.

As leaders in the interoperability of location information, OGC is inviting expressions of interest for sponsorship of its Health SDI initiative. The Health SDI Initiative is a community-driven, collaborative initiative that will, for the first time, bring together health, location, and technology experts to define, prototype, and demonstrate how to effectively connect different systems to find quick answers and enable informed decision-making during health crises.

The initiative targets both the criticality of the location element and the importance of timely data sharing. This will be accomplished by collaboratively developing and evolving a standards-based Health Spatial Data Infrastructure underpinned by the FAIR guiding principles.

Such a Health SDI can support a wide range of applications, including many that were leveraged in support of the COVID-19 crisis:

• Early detection and predictive impact analysis;
• Devising quarantine/de-quarantine plans;
• Optimizing management, allocation and deployment of resources (e.g. PPE);
• Monitoring impact, transmission risks and case reporting;
• Studying the impacts of crises on supply chains (e.g. food and essential supplies);
• Understanding economic and critical infrastructure impacts;
• And more… 

Join us in defining a Health SDI that can serve as an Epidemic & Pandemic Early Warning, Response and Recovery Platform. One that addresses community use-cases and business & technical requirements and is based on the use of FAIR location information principles and the latest geospatial and IT technologies.

Expressions of interest for sponsorship are due by September 22, 2020. For more information, including how to express interest in sponsoring the initiative, visit the OGC Health SDI Initiative webpage.

A teleconference will be organized on September 30 with those expressing interest to brief progress and agree on next steps. OGC will work with prospective sponsors to develop detailed requirements, and help identify cross-sponsor and use-case synergies.

About OGC
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of more than 500 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities driven to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
OGC’s member-driven consensus process creates royalty free, publicly available geospatial standards. Existing at the cutting edge, OGC actively analyzes and anticipates emerging tech trends, and runs an agile, collaborative Research and Development (R&D) lab that builds and tests innovative prototype solutions to members' use cases.
OGC members together form a global forum of experts and communities that use location to connect people with technology and improve decision-making at all levels. OGC is committed to creating a sustainable future for us, our children, and future generations.
Visit ogc.org for more info on our work.