(January 21, 2003) - Sponsors, participants, and invited guests joined the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) at Lockheed Martin recently to view the results of the OGC Web Services 1.2 Testbed initiative. The demonstration focused on emergency response situations in a mock Department of Homeland Security Emergency Operations Center, showing how recent advances in OGC's interoperability architecture enable integration of geospatial information and geoprocessing software via the World Wide Web.

Attendees saw the use of live sensors, the tasking of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), and the integration of data, services, and other elements hosted on servers worldwide. While the demonstration employed a variety of software products and geospatial data drawn from local, state, and federal agencies and the private sector, OGC Interoperability Program executive director Jeff Harrison made it clear that what was important was that all of the technology worked together through OGC interfaces.

Some of the work in OWS 1.2 focused on enhancing existing OpenGIS Specifications such as Geography Markup Language and Web Feature Service, while others defined new interfaces that may someday become specifications, including such technologies as image handling, Web-based sensor planning and collection, service registries, symbol/style management, and composite services .

The UAV scenario illustrated mobile targeting - using an aerial sensor to capture images over an area - and allowed analysts to examine them to determine if a specific vehicle entered the area of interest. A series of services executing together, a composite service, made this possible. Draft interfaces for a variety of services, including a Sensor Planning Service, Web Notification Service, Sensor Collection Service, Sensor Markup Language (SensorML), Image Archive Service, Web Coverage Service, and Coverage Portrayal Service each played a part in the procedure. These services, all linked together, demonstrated a method to gather imagery rapidly and provide it for analysis.

OGC Web Services 1.2 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 Initiative's sponsoring organizations.

OGC is an international industry consortium of more than 230 companies, government agencies, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface specifications. OpenGIS Specifications support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless, and location-based services, and mainstream IT.