Open Geospatial Consortium Test Beds

LISAsoft has helped agencies participate in spatial standards development and the stressing and verification of upcoming standards, by coordinating schema development, and building software test pilot applications in OGC testbeds.

The Challenge

To support Australian and New Zealand organisations to develop international geo-standards through the OGC’s test bed program. 

The Solution

Since 2007, LISAsoft has been involved in the development and testing of OGC standards. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is the international organisation which coordinates the development of standards for the geospatial community. Its members are developers, operators and users of spatially-based information systems.

The OGC uses test beds (environments created specifically for testing purposes) to collaboratively stress and refine candidate standards which have been proposed by member organisations. They involve many datasets, software applications and organisations and are designed to test interoperability in the real world.

In conjunction with Australia’s Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI), Lisasoft collaborated on a pilot project for GeoConnections, a Canadian government instrumentality that was developing the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure. LISAsoft developed map viewers that would support the OGC's WMS, WFS and metadata standards.

Later, for the OGC’s Web Services Project 5 (OWS-5), LISAsoft helped community uptake of the newly introduced KML standard, by extending KML support in OpenLayers and Mapbuilder browser based clients.

For OWS-6,  LISAsoft developed a validation tool to test conformance to CityGML, as well as an implementation of the proposed Web Map Tiling Service standard. Many of the lessons learned in developing the tiling service were fed back to OGC and helped shape the standard.

LISAsoft was involved in three strands of the OWS 7 testbed. One was a project to undertake the modelling and validation of aeronautical schemas. LISAsoft built application schemas and validation rules from UML models, which were then used to test Web Feature Services in the Aeronautical Information Exchange Model.

LISAsoft coordinated contributions from OGC stakeholders for the proposed OWS Context standard, which describes an interoperable map view.

The company also collaborated with CSIRO, Landcare Research in New Zealand and Landgate in the development of support of OGC’s Web Processing Service (WPS) in uDIG, a geospatial client application. WPS is a standard interface for accessing geospatial algorithms.

In OWS-8, LISAsoft is building a Domain Modelling Cookbook in conjunction with CSIRO. The Cookbook provides a step-by-step guide for building sustainable, interoperable, cross-agency, Domain Models using best practice processes and tools. In parallel, LISAsoft is developing a FarmML model, and further refactoring and providing validation tools for the AIXM Aviation Domain Model.