OGC Web Services, Phase 8 (OWS-8)

On 22 November 2010, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) issued a Request for Quotations/Call for Participation (RFQ/CFP) for the OGC Web Services, Phase 8 (OWS-8) Interoperability Initiative, a testbed to advance OGC's open interoperability framework for geospatial capabilities. The RFQ/CFP is available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/74. The project is now complete, and final demonstration slides and videos are posted at http://www.opengeospatial.org/pub/www/ows8/index.html.

OWS testbeds are part of OGC's Interoperability Program, a global, hands-on and collaborative prototyping program designed to rapidly develop, test and deliver proven candidate specifications into OGC's Specification Program, where they are formalized for public release. In OGC's Interoperability Initiatives, international teams of technology providers work together to solve specific geoprocessing interoperability problems posed by the Initiative's sponsoring organizations. OGC Interoperability Initiatives include test beds, pilot projects, interoperability experiments and interoperability support services - all designed to encourage rapid development, testing, validation and adoption of OGC standards.

OWS-8 Sponsors and Activity Threads

• U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)
• U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)
• U.S. Army Geospatial Center (AGC)
• U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
• EUROCONTROL
• U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
• European Space Agency (ESA)
• U.K. Defence Science and Technology Laboratary (DSTL)
• Lockheed Martin Corporation

The OWS-8 sponsors are organizations seeking open standards for their interoperability requirements. After analyzing their requirements, the OGC Interoperability Team recommend to the sponsors that the content of the OWS-8 initiative be organized around the following threads:

• Observation Fusion
  • WCS 2.0 Earth Observation Application Profile, WCPS, Compliance Test Scripts
  • Detection, tracking, and bookmarking of moving objects in video, implemented using SWE and other OGC encodings and interfaces. 
• Geosynchronization (Gsync) 
  
  • Geodata Bulk Transfer: The ability to distribute individual data sets and/or collections of data sets in a consistent manner offline and over networks.
    
  • Geosynchronization: Web services and client components to support synchronization and updates of geospatial data across a hierarchical Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI).

• Cross-Community Interoperability (CCI)
  • Advancement of semantic mediation approaches to query and use data based on different heterogeneous data models, which are available via OGC WFS.
  • Advancement of the use of style registries and styling services.
  • Advancement of the use of KML.
  • Advancement of the use of UML/OCL for Schema Automation on Domain Models.

• Aviation
  • AIXM: Maturing the delivery, filtering and update of AIXM 5.1 using WFS-T/FE 2.0;  continuing the development of reusable tools, benchmarking of compression techniques for enhanced performance, advancing styling and portrayal support, and validating the emerging metadata and GML profiles. 
  • Event Notification Architecture: including Digital NOTAM Events.
  • WXXM and weather information:  using coverages for encoding representative weather forecast and radar datasets, supporting on-demand Coordinate Reference System (CRS) specifications/transformations, exploring alternative distributed architectures for managing Units of Measure (UoM), demonstrating the applications of probabilistic Terminal Aerodrome Forecasts (TAF) decision making applications, and reviewing/validating the WXXM schemas.

  OGC members who wish to observe OWS-8 may do so upon submission of the OWS-8 Observer Agreement.

Schedule of Events and Milestones