Geoprocessing and WPS standard expert Benjamin Proß presented 52°North’s ideas and development plans for Testbed work items at the recent Testbed 14 kickoff meeting.

OGC Testbed 14 participants met in Reston, Virginia for OGC’s 100th initiative to develop new standards and architectures, transforming how geospatial information is shared and used. 52°North is involved in two of the four threads:

• Modeling, Portrayal, and Quality of Service (MoPoQ)
• Next Generation Services (NextGen).

52°North is responsible for the work items Machine Learning System and Image Repository and Feature Store in the MoPoQ Thread. The Machine Learning System will be encapsulated in a WPS 2.0 service. In order to do this, 52°North will extend the WPS 2.0 specification with new features. Since Machine Learning involves training steps, the 52°North team needs to develop ways to let the WPS know that it is training the algorithm and not actually executing it.

52°North will also implement the Image Repository and Feature Store that will provide EO data for the Machine Learning algorithms.

In the NextGen Thread, 52°North will edit the WPS-T Engineering Report (ER) and work on the NGA Analysis Tool WPS. The WPS-T ER will actually be a formal extension of the WPS 2.0 specification. It will enable the user to deploy and undeploy new processes to a WPS instance. At the same time, 52°North will develop a reference implementation in Testbed 14.

The NGA Analysis Tool WPS will encapsulate different data analysis tools provided by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). The tools will be available as WPS 2.0 processes. A WPS 2.0 profile will be created for data analysis tools.

As an ER editor, Benjamin Proß participated in the closing plenary. He presented how the ER will affect the OGC baseline and what possible implications are for end users and developers.