OGC Requests

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has issued a Request for Quotations/Call for Participation (RFQ/CFP) to solicit proposals in response to requirements for the OGC Climatology-Hydrology Information Sharing Pilot (CHISP), Phase 1 (CHISP-1).

The RFQ/CFP is available at below.

Responses are due by 14 September, 2012.

A bidders’ teleconference was held on 15 August 2012. More information will be available below.

The Point of Contact is Lew Leinenweber (lleinenweber at opengeospatial.org).

The CHISP-1 sponsors are:

• GeoConnections - Natural Resources Canada and Environment Canada
• US Geological Survey (USGS)
• US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Around the world, there is a critical need for improved sharing, accessing, and integration of hydrologic and climatic data.  To meet that need, CHISP-1 will engage leaders in the hydro-climatic community to collaboratively build a duplicable system that uses existing resources – including data portals, standards, technologies, activities, and expertise. These resources are available to stakeholders in all countries.

CHISP-1 will create a virtual observatory system for water resources observations and forecasts in parts of the U.S. and Canada, building on current networks and capabilities to support:

1. Hydrologic modeling of Milk River and Souris River for historical, current and future streamflow and inundation conditions.
2. Modeling and assessment of nutrient flux into the Great Lakes, which requires accessing and integrating water quality data from multiple agencies

Advantages of creating this system in an OGC Pilot Project include:

• Management by a neutral organization
• Use of a mature and trusted vendor-neutral process led by experienced administrative and technical project managers
• Design and development best practices (iterative, agile approach to building a SOA-based system)
• Inclusive process, with open, international call for participation from potential sponsors, and recruiting of industry's best and brightest to staff the development team.

CHISP-1 will exercise OGC encoding and service standards, including the OGC WaterML 2.0 Encoding Standard, the OGC Sensor Observation Service (SOS) standard and others.

CHISP-1 offers many benefits. In addition to leveraging the large body of existing related activities, those activities, and others like them around the world, will be enhanced by and benefit from the pilot outcomes. By pooling resources to accomplish a shared objective, the sponsors and participants in CHISP-1 reduce their development risks and leverage their investment. In addition to identifying and clarifying what is possible, the pilot will identify the key technical and non-technical barriers to continued progress in sharing and integrating hydrologic and climatic information. Because it is an international project with broad industry participation, it will promote understanding and strengthen ties within the existing hydro-climatic community.

Bidder's Conference

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CHISP-1 Bidders Teleconference Dial-in:

+1 415 363 0833 passcode:665541

WebEx Information:

Host: Leinenweber, Lewis

Start Time: 08/15/2012 : 11:00 AM - 02:00 PM [EDT - US/Eastern]
Duration: 180 minutes
Meeting URL: https://portal.opengeospatial.org/webex_auth.php?AT=JM&MK=798776961&PW=C...

Clarifications

The most recent clarifications are dated 2012-08-20

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has issued a Request for Quotations/Call for Participation (RFQ/CFP) to solicit proposals in response to requirements for the Special Activity Airspace (SAA) Dissemination Pilot, sponsored by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The RFQ/CFP is below. Responses are due by October 18, 2010. A bidders’ teleconference will be held on October 4, 2010. The Point of Contact for the SAA SWIM Pilot is Nadine Alameh nalameh [at] opengeospatial.org.

The FAA SAA Dissemination Pilot will extend the SAA SWIM Services to enable the dissemination of SAA information (including updates and schedule changes) to National Airspace System (NAS) stakeholders and other external users via services that implement OGC Web Services (OWS) standards.

In support of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), the FAA SWIM program seeks to achieve systems interoperability and information management for diverse Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems using Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). The FAA SWIM capabilities include supporting the exchange of SAA information between operational ATM systems. SAAs include Special Use Airspaces (SUA) - regions of airspace designated for use by the military ensuring no other traffic uses that airspace during scheduled times.

The FAA SAA DisseminationPilot shall build on SAA SWIM Services leveraging the OGC Web Feature Service (WFS), the OGC Feature Portrayal Service (FPS), the (draft) Event Service and the Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM), Support the filtering, access and portrayal of SAA information as well as the notification to subscribed users of SAA updates and schedule changes,and support the evolution towards end-to-end automated information flow from the US Department of Defense (DoD) - originators of SAA activation requests - to airlines and other NAS stakeholders.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has issued a Request for Quotations/Call for Participation (RFQ/CFP) to solicit proposals in response to requirements for the OGC Testbed 10.

The RFQ/CFP is available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/pub/www/ows10/rfq/index.html.

Organizations who haven't previously been engaged in OGC Testbeds are encouraged to check out the quickstart guide for help on navigating the RFQ.

Responses are due by 5 pm EST on 26 August 2013.

An IP Program and Testbed 10 Q&A Webinar will be held on 6 August 2013 at 10 am EDT (Check your local time http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20130806T14). Register here https://portal.opengeospatial.org/public_ogc/register/130806ows10.php. For the most efficient use of this webinar, please send your questions in advance to techdesk [at] opengeospatial.org.

You are also invited to follow us on twitter, Linkedin or Facebook to stay updated on the Q&A Webinar, clarifications to requirements, kickoff details, etc.

The OGC Testbed 10 Kickoff event for the CCI and Open Mobility threads (see below) will be held 7-9 October 2013 in Washington, DC. The Aviation thread kickoff will be held 27 September in Frascati, Italy during the week of the OGC Technical Committee Meeting in Frascati.

The Point of Contact is Nadine Alameh: techdesk [at] opengeospatial.org.

The OGC Testbed 10 sponsors are:

• AGC (Army Geospatial Center, US Army Corps of Engineers)
• ESA (European Space Agency)
• EUROCONTROL
• FAA (US Federal Aviation Administration)
• GeoConnections - Natural Resources Canada
• Harris Corporation
• Lockheed Martin Corporation
• NGA (US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency)
• NOAA National Weather Service
• USGS (US Geological Survey)
• UK DSTL (UK MoD Defence Science and Technology Laboratory)

OGC Testbed 10 builds on the outcomes of prior OGC initiatives (http://www.opengeospatial.org/resource/demos) and is organized around the following threads:

-   Cross-Community Interoperability (CCI): Increase Geospatial community interoperability by building on CCI OWS-9 work in semantic mediation, volunteer geographic information (VGI), provenance and data quality, and Global Gazetteer. Explore the potential of interoperability in the hydrology domain and utilizing ontologies to more easily share and visualize geospatial data.

-   Open Mobility: Explore the geospatial standards requirements needed to support the growing emerging mobile environment where client applications are mobile, information services are mobile, and increasingly distributed across cloud infrastructures. The Open Mobility thread will address these requirements while leveraging on the work achieved in the OWS-9 Testbed in the areas of Geopackages and Geopackaging services and new OWS Context encodings.

-   Aviation: Develop and demonstrate the use of the Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM) and the Flight Information Exchange Model (FIXM), building on the work accomplished in prior testbeds to advance the applications of OGC Web Services standards in next generation air traffic management systems to support European and US aviation modernization programs.

The RFQ/CFP includes details of these threads as well as details on participation eligibility, selection process and kickoff workshop information.

OGC testbeds, pilot projects and interoperability experiments are part of the OGC Interoperability Program, a global, hands-on collaborative agile prototyping program designed to rapidly develop, test and deliver proven candidate standards into the OGC Standards Program, where they are formalized for public release.

Introduction

With this Request for Information (RFI), The Open Geospatial Consortium Inc. (OGC) is soliciting input on technologies related to Contextual State Descriptions (CSD).  A CSD describes the "environment" or context in which a service chain executes. The objective of this request is to identify existing capabilities that can provide a robust metadata foundation for supporting agile, adaptive, autonomous processes capable of producing repeatable, predictable results with no intervention.

In August, 2004, the Open Geospatial Consortium Inc. (OGC) issued a call for sponsors for an OGC Web Services 3 (OWS-3) interoperability initiative, a multi-threaded test bed activity to advance OGC's open framework for interoperability in the geospatial industry.  Key Components of OWS-3 will Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) and Service Chaining.  Each of these components are described below followed by some potential uses for CSD in OWS-3.

Organizations with relevant technology regarding CSD are urged to respond to this RFI. Information on how to respond are at the end of this RFI.  The contents of the OWS-3 request for quotations (RFQ) will be based in part on the RFI response to the CSD RFI.

Sensor Web Enablement and OpenGIS SensorWeb™

A key component of OWS-3 will be Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), in which OGC members are developing standard interfaces and encodings that will enable real time integration of heterogeneous sensor webs into the information infrastructure. Developers will use these specifications in creating applications, platforms, and products involving web-connected devices such as flood gauges, air pollution monitors, stress gauges on bridges, mobile heart monitors, Webcams, and robots as well as space and airborne earth imaging devices. Several elements of SWE have already been developed and are being finalized before they are submitted to the OGC membership for adoption. CSD is a potential new element of SWE.

OWS-3 will combine the previous work on SensorWeb with the OWS-2 Image Handling and Decision support results to provide automated workflow management to produce value-added products. SensorWeb is the source of tremendous amounts of geospatial data, e.g.,  in-situ, imagery and simulation data.  The Decision Support component of OWS-3 will continue the work of OWS-2 Service Chaining to produce value-added information products derived from SensorWeb data.

Using CSD for Service Chaining

A major thrust of OWS-2 was Image Handling for Decision Support. The Image Handling component of OWS-2 increased the ability to access and process geographic imagery into value-added products using open web services.  The Decision Support component of OWS-2 demonstrated automated service chaining of imager processing services.  This automation was achieved with an emerging open specification of workflow management: BPEL.

This RFI seeks input on the technology related to Contextual State Descriptions (CSD).  A CSD could describe the "environment" or context in which a service chain "executes". A well-characterized service chain or workflow derives a repeatable result given equivalent sources, methods, and processing state or context.  A workflow script defines the order of service invocation in a service chain but the details of the services are hidden behind the web service interface. A CSD provides information about the distributed processing environment and resources that are hidden behind the interfaces.  A CSD is specifically designed to address environmental state descriptions, in such a manner that an equivalent state can be recreated at some future point to provide identical, repeatable results from a specified process, assuming identical sources, services and scripting are utilized.

When workflows are manually executed and interpreted, complexity can be addressed through human intuition and experience.  However, in an autonomous environment, complexity must be distilled into codified states, before business logic can be characterized to facilitate autonomous processing with any level of confidence.  Thus, a CSD is specifically designed to facilitate the autonomous processing of complex workflows in a predictable, repeatable fashion.

The promise of complex autonomous processing is the increased productivity of end user "analysts" that presently focus an inordinate amount of their time preparing data instead of analyzing it.  Thus, the transition of data into information into knowledge into some form of decision or course of action is largely still a manual process that cannot be reliably repeated.  True autonomous processing will not determine the ultimate course of action from a workflow, but can relieve the analyst from having to manually shepherd data through this workflow process, freeing them to focus on interpreting the derived knowledge into alternative courses of action in less time than the current process requires to develop a single course of action manually.

CSD does not describe the workflow business logic, but the contextual state that the workflow executes within.  Thus, the CSD would describe the systems configuration, the hardware configuration, the firmware used by each device, the operating system, including patches, the software configuration, including external dependencies (shared libraries), and any data.  All of this information characterizes the operational state or context of the system. Any change in this contextual state may result in discrepancies when the workflow is re-executed.

Potential use for CSD in OWS3

OWS-3 will apply service chaining to enable use of SensorWeb technologies for decision support.  This technology will allow sensor measurements and modeling predictions to be processed into higher-value information specific to a given decision making context.  CSD may be used to capture the state of the service chain including the SensorWeb components and the geo-processing services and the workflow management components.  Capturing this information in a CSD will allow for post-processing analysis of the decision support information.

For instance, this initiative could describe each of the sensor components of the current SensorWeb, as well as a corresponding set of metadata to describe the processing chain.  Quality metrics embedded within the data stream can describe the resultant accuracies associated with any point in the stream.  However, when a degraded signal is recorded within the sensor stream, there is no context to interpret the cause and effort on the resulting value-added information.  The CSD associated with this process could describe the environmental context or state that the SensorWeb was operating within to illustrate the reason for the degraded decision support information.

Due to the potential iterative nature of CSDs, a normalizing relationship structure must be provided to "relate" voluminous descriptive metadata references, without requiring these references to be redundantly embedded within a single CSD.  Several compelling technologies and standards currently exist to address these specific issues.  The net result of an CSD-enabled workflow would be a greater understanding of the situational context present when the SensorWeb was captured.  These concepts are not new and have often been referred to as "fusion", multi-INT/multi-Source, and/or horizontal integration.

CSD could be applied to the OWS-2 Image Handling results including automated image orthorectification.  In OWS-2, the orthorectification was accessible by a single web service request without exposing the underlying processing hardware.  While retaining this simple web service interface, CSD could be used to capture a description of the underlying processing environment.  For example, orthorectification may be performed by a cluster-based computing task with the processing load distributed across all available nodes in the cluster.  Depending upon the load on the system, the number of nodes available during processing time, the system resources allocated to each node and the system, the methods and availability of source materials (raw imagery and control information), and the business logic applied to the process (tiling inputs, parallel vs. serial processing, types of control applied), the resultant orthorectified images will be created with varying degrees of accuracies and latencies.  Once sufficiently populated, these accuracies and latencies (CSDs) can be mined to support the development of an adaptive system, whereby an orthorectification request can be fulfilled based on the degrees of freedom provided by varying the accuracies or latency in the fulfillment of this request.

Objective Requirements

The objective of this RFI is to identify existing capabilities that can provide a robust metadata foundation for supporting agile, adaptive, autonomous processes capable of producing repeatable, predictable results with no intervention.  These objectives are purposely abstracted to describe a wide variety of processes or workflows, beyond just computer system processes.

A CSD shall describe the contextual state of a process or workflow. The structure of a CSD shall be such that a subsequent re-execution of a specified process will generate equivalent results, assuming the state from which the original process executed can be faithfully replicated.  A CSD shall be capable of relating or referencing other external processes, services, or data as part of a contextual state.  External references embedded within a CSD should not require the inclusion of the full reference, but rather a form of relation that will support normalized, iterative references.  CSD shall not be explicitly tied to computer system processes or workflows, but must support a much broader, abstracted description of a process and/or workflow.

CSD is information, i.e., metadata, about the processing environment. OGC has adopted and implemented ISO 19115:2003, Geographic Information - Metadata in OGC Abstract Specification, Topic 11 - Metadata. While ISO 19115 is primarily for the description of datasets, it includes metadata to describe the processing history of a dataset.  While the objectives of CSD exceed the elements in ISO 19115, CSD implementations must utilize elements of ISO 19115 when appropriate in lieu of defining new terms for the same concept.

Methodologies need to be developed to couple CSDs with processes and workflows as logical metadata structures.  Methodologies need to be provided to extract the contextual state from a system, process or workflow and codify that state within a specified CSD. Additional methodologies need to be provided to extract a contextual state from a CSD to reconfigure (to the extent physically possible) a described system capable of re-executing the process or workflow associated with the CSD.  Methods need to be developed that can identify and codify the differences between two CSDs, forming the basis for determining whether two CSDs are essentially equivalent.  A CSD shall be capable of being described in a service context that will facilitate autonomous processing of CSD attributed processes and workflows.

Responding to this Request

Organizations responding to this request should send a short document to:

George Percivall
Executive Director, Interoperability Architecture
Open Geospatial Consortium
percivall [at] opengeospatial.org

A response to this RFI must contain the following information:

• A description of the technology relevant to CSD
• Descriptions of example implementations of the relevant technology
• Applicability of the technology to OWS3, e.g., SWE and Service Chaining.

Documents in pdf format are preferred.

Submission of proprietary information is discouraged. Any response containing proprietary information must place that information in a separate file.  Do not send proprietary information unless your organization has previously executed a Non-Disclosure Agreement with OGC.

Any organization with relevant technology can respond to this RFI.  You need not be a member of OGC to respond.  There is no reimbursement for responding to this RFI. By accepting an RFI response, OGC implies no endorsement of the technology and there is no implied agreement that the contents of an RFI response will be reflected in the OWS-3 RFQ.

For more information about CSD Services, contact:

Brent Bursey
President, Great-Circle Technologies, Inc.,
703 764-9140,
BBursey [at] Great-CircleTech.com

The OGC is an international industry consortium of more than 250 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications. OpenGIS(R) Specifications support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. The specifications empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org.

Candidate Submission: Tue, 2004-08-10 17:00
Close request period: Thu, 2006-08-10 17:00
TC and PC vote to issue request: Thu, 2006-08-10 17:00
Begin request period: Thu, 2006-08-10 17:00