RFQ targeted for technology developers interested in a major Interoperability Initiative to develop and enhance OGC Web Services standards that enable easy discovery, access and use of geographic data and geoprocessing services.

The Open GIS Consortium Inc. (OGC), Wayland, Mass., announced a Request For Quotations (RFQ) from technology developers interested in a major Interoperability Initiative to develop and enhance OGC Web Services standards that enable easy discovery, access and use of geographic data and geoprocessing services. The OGC Web Services Phase 2 (OWS-2) testbed advances OGC Web Services (OWS), the set of OpenGIS Specifications for interfaces, schemas and encodings that comprise the interoperability framework for the emerging "Spatial Web."

Building on previous work in other OGC initiatives and technical working groups, selected OWS-2 participants will work collaboratively to extend and "ruggedize" existing and draft OpenGIS standards into a robust and complete interoperability framework for implementing multi-vendor enterprise, and enterprise-to-enterprise, solutions in government and business. The work will address a rich set of requirements provided by OWS-2's public and private sector sponsors. Sponsors include: The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, NASA, Spot Image (France), Sun Microsystems and other organizations.

Participants will work in the following areas:

• Common Architecture: using the W3C's WSDL and SOAP standards for "publishing, finding and binding" geoprocessing services.
• Technical Baseline Maturation: Developing compliance tests for and improving the OpenGIS Specifications for Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), Web Coverage Service (WCS), Web Object Service (WOS), Catalog Services - Web (CS-W) and Geography Mark-up Language (GML 3.x.). Catalog Services will be prototyped in vendors' standards-based commercial off-the-shelf (SCOTS) product offerings. A Reference Implementation for Web Coverage Server and for an Integrated Client will be created under this initiative.
• Image Handling and Decision Support Tools: "Finding, binding, and chaining" individual Web accessible image archival and processing functions sequentially into complete workflows.
• Information Interoperability: advancing information interoperability using GML and advancing connections with Web Feature Server and GML 3.
• Open Location Services. New additions and enhancements will be made to the existing Open Location Services framework.

The Request for Quotations can be downloaded from www.opengis.org/initiatives/?iid=7. A Bidder's Conference (a conference call) will be held, as announced in the RFQ, on Dec. 18, 2003. Questions for the call must be sent to by 2200 GMT on Dec. 15, 2003. The conference call will be repeated at three times during the day to accommodate participants in European, American and Asian time zones (please check www.opengis.org/initiatives/?iid=7 after Dec. 15, 2003 for dial-in details and exact times). The response period begins Nov. 24, 2003 and ends Jan. 9, 2004. The OWS-2 kickoff will take place March 8-12, 2004 and the final demonstration of capabilities will take place in August, 2004. The initiative manager will be Chuck Heazel.

For more information on the OWS-2 Initiative, please contact Kurt Buehler, 812-320-1423, .

OWS-2 is part of OGC's Interoperability Program, a global, collaborative, hands-on engineering and testing program that rapidly delivers 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 Initiatives' Sponsors.

Source: OGC