The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) requests comments on the charter for a proposed Quality of Service and Experience (QoSE) Domain Working Group (DWG).

Spatial data now plays a critical role in the smooth functioning of contemporary society. From aiding emergency workers during crises to empowering businesses to make informed decisions, the reliable availability of the spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) that provide this critical spatial information is more important than ever.

Yet, despite their critical nature, SDIs may suffer from sub-optimal configuration, malfunctioning hardware, or other factors that ultimately affect the accessibility of that data. The closely related fields of Quality of Service (QoS)  and Quality of Experience (QoE) deal with estimating, reporting, and improving the experienced quality of communication between the components of distributed systems to inform the SDI users of the suitability of the service for the users’ needs.

Organizations must establish a reliable SDI and measure, improve, and communicate information about QoS criteria – such as availability, performance, and capacity of SDI components – to end users. Mature tools for measuring and analyzing the QoS of these SDI components do exist, but there is little to no support for a standardized way of communicating the expected QoS level of the services to the end users and/or their analysis tools.

The OGC QoSE DWG will provide a forum for discussing the evaluation of the QoS and QoE of an SDI as whole, and, when appropriate, propose corrections and enhancements to the existing OGC Standards (or externally governed standards) and guidance to make it easier to improve the experienced quality of Spatial Data Services.

Further, the QoSE DWG will provide a forum for presenting, discussing, and sharing knowledge about evaluating and improving the QoS and QoE of Spatial Data Services from the perspective of the applications and organisations relying on these services for delivering timely and accurate spatial information to the end users.

The draft charter for the QoSE DWG is available for download from https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/71360  Comments are requested by 15 November 2016, and can be submitted to charter-requests@opengeospatial.org.

About the OGC

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 525 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at www.opengeospatial.org.