Empire Challenge pilot effort -- Calling all researchers

Report: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is seeking researchers from government agencies, private industry and academia to participate in a pilot programme to examine the suitability and performance of OGC Sensor Web Enablement and OGC Web Services standards for providing open management of and access to sensors of various types.

The Empire Challenge is an annual demonstration sponsored by the U.S. Joint Forces Command and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGIA). It seeks to improve the interoperability of joint and coalition intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance activities.

OGC is an international consortium of more than 365 companies, government agencies and research organizations that develop publicly available geospatial standards. The group demonstrated a common interface during last year’s Empire Challenge that allowed analysts to detect and access sensors from different sources.

The project for this year’s Empire Challenge is to bring those capabilities into the classified environment of the Distributed Common Ground System, the architecture that the armed forces use to share sensor information and other data within the intelligence community.

Proposals are due to OGC by Jan. 14, 2009. Technology deployments will be complete by July 17, 2009, followed immediately by a two-week demonstration phase.