Communication of location information plays an increasingly important role in human activities, and there is still time to join a yearly testbed focused on solving the difficult issues involved in location communication and integration.

In recent weeks, sponsors committed to supporting the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Testbed 11 have been documenting use cases, submitting requirements, and interoperability scenarios for this testbed. Organizations selected to participate in OWS-11 are committing to develop solutions based on these scenarios. Participant solutions will implement both existing OGC standards as well as new prototype interface and encoding specifications that may be developed in the testbed. Prototype specifications may ultimately become OGC standards.

This cutting edge technology work has enormous potential for testbed stakeholders – both the technology users and the technology providers – and for the world at large.

The OGC membership would like to enlist additional sponsors to slightly broaden the scope and share the cost of this testbed. Interested potential sponsors who contact the testbed organizers will benefit first by learning at an early stage who the other sponsors are, what issues they are focused on, and what new capabilities are in the industry pipeline. If new potential sponsors’ requirements align roughly with what is now in the plan, those organizations can still become sponsors and tune the testbed plan to meet their needs. The current Testbed 11 plan addresses:

Interface and Encoding engineering

REST and SOAP for the OGC suite of service standards
Using JSON and GeoJSON across OGC service standards.
Security – standards based solutions to implementing Authentication, Authorization, Access, Control and Auditing capabilities for the suite of OGC service standards.
Semantically Enabled OGC Web Services: Semantic Mediation between Vocabularies and Ontologies; Linked Data; Data Provenance
Climate change is the theme for the Testbed 11 scenario. The specific use case is a displaced population due to coastal inundation. Solving the use case will involve:

Services based on OGC standards to support crisis notification, predictive analysis, rapid access to data, access to social media

Implementations of many existing OGC standards
Incorporating social media in emergency response
Additional requirements regarding Geo4NIEM and Aviation are being reviewed.