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    CGS Initiative:
The Persistent Test Bed (PTB)

To facilitate research into geospatial interoperability and web-based GIS, a project to establish a persistent testbed for geospatial research and teaching has been commissioned by EuroSDR, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), and the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories for Europe (AGILE).


Historically, GIS have been standalone desktop applications. The emergence of open web mapping APIs such as OpenLayers, Virtual Earth and Google Maps has enabled the embedding of geospatial capability into websites and portals. At the same time that web mapping has become popular, the geospatial community has developed specifications that make it possible to manage, process, and disseminate geospatial data on the web.

However, as an emerging technology, web-based GIS does not currently address all the requirements fulfilled by desktop GIS - particularly in terms of secure data access and management of very large data sets. Hence, the key objectives of the Permanant Test Bed project are:

1. To act as a research test-bed for collaborative European research in geospatial interoperability.

2. To aid the assessment of the current standards for geospatial interoperability in terms of research compatibility, completeness, consistency, ease of use and extensibility.

3. To provide an environment for teaching standards and techniques for geospatial interoperability.

4. To provide a resource to AGILE/EuroSDR/OGC for the coordination of research requirements as well as definition, testing, validation and development of open standards.

The persistent testbed has web services as its primary buildings blocks. A web-service may be considered to be a modular unit of remotely-hosted "black box" functionality with observable behaviour as specified by its service contract. Approximately 30 academic institutions from across Europe responded to the call for expressions of interest in the initiative and a number have contributed web services based on specifications of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The contributed services include:

  • Web Feature Services (WFS): for publishing vector data
  • Web Map Services (WMS): for publishing rendered maps
  • Web Processing Services (WPS): for publishing functionality
  • Web Coverage Services (WCS): for publishing raster data
  • Catalogue Service for the Web (CSW): for publishing metadata about geospatial data, services and other resources.

Four use-cases have been designed by members of the testbed project. The use-cases cover a variety of thematic applications including unified portrayal, schematization and semantics for service discovery.

This initiative is led at CGS by Dr. Jerry Swan and Prof. Mike Jackson.
Research Areas:
• Geoinformatics & Data Modelling
• Geospatial Intelligence
• Interoperability & Standards
• Location Based Services
• Semantics & Reasoning

CGS Initiatives:
• The Persistent Test Bed
• Geospatial Learning Initiative
• Reality Markup Project

Funded Projects:
• GIS4EU
• D-scent
• Map Schematization
• OS "Future Data"
• Disaster Management
• GIGAS Interoperability
• The e-soter Platform
• SWIMA
• Eye Tracking