OWS-5 Testbed Addendum Released

Overview

This document is an addendum to the previously issued OWS-5 RFQ/CFP and includes new requirements to be included in the Agile Geography thread of the ongoing OWS-5 testbed. The requirements within this addendum should be addressed within the overall context of the original OWS-5 RFQ/CFP. It should be noted that schedule information contained within this document supercedes that which was found in the original OWS-5 RFQ/CFP.

The content within this RFQ covers two topics and are described in further detail below:

1. GeoSynchronization
2. OWS Core and Extension Experiment

1) GeoSynchronization

GeoSynchronization targets a federated environment comprised of loosely affiliated parties who desire to collaborate on the development and maintenance of a shared geospatial data set. Additionally, technology is enabling new online markets for information sharing and processing to emerge. These too can achieve cost and time benefits from leveraging loosely coupled, industry standards for sharing and synchronization. Solving this interoperability issue is of critical importance to ongoing Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) initiatives across the globe, as parties with differing software infrastructures, organizational goals, and legal mandates seek to increase the availability of geospatial information across society without incurring prohibitive costs. While existing OGC technologies have made it easier to publish information in an interoperable manner, creating the potential for effective sharing and collaboration, another level of interoperability technology is required to manage the intricacies of cross-organizational data sharing, which may include acceptance, validation, rejection, and description of operations on information streams.

In this testbed participants will be funded to experiment with solutions that leverage GML-based information models, such as the GML profiles being developed for US framework data sets and the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure. Mass market information models, such as Atom+GeoRSS GML and KML may be considered as well. It is expected that investigations in this area will likely extend the WFS Transactional architecture to accommodate a more loosely coupled approach. However, alternative architectures will be considered as well.

2) OWS Core and Extension Experiment

The OGC in general, and the OGC Architecture Board (OAB) in particular, is considering a more formal, modular approach to standards that is described in "OGC Abstract Specification - The Model Specification - Structuring an OGC specification to encourage implementation, version 07-056r2". In support of this effort, this OWS-5 task uses the guidance from this document and applies it to the "OpenGIS® Web Feature Service (WFS) Implementation Specification", "Gazetteer Service - Application Profile of the Web Feature Service Implementation Specification", and the Web Processing Service.