OGC API state of play – a practical testbed for the national spatial data infrastructure in Switzerland

Interoperability standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) shape a backbone within the OSGeo community by defining a pathway to software implementation toward the standardization of geospatial information and related services ensuring interoperability between FOSS4G software. In 2016, the OGC has initiated the creation of a new generation of standards based on the OpenAPI specifications to facilitate the integration of geospatial data in modern web applications and systems. From a practical perspective this paper intends to address the question how organizations and institutions anticipate to leverage this new generation of standards in order to deploy a geospatial data infrastructure. This issue is at the core of this article and at the center of a project that seeks to address the issue by running a Testbed Platform with a special focus to the Swiss context. To challenge these standards, the Testbed platform is configured to run a showcase with experimental cases about climate change. It is expected to bring good visibility toward all actors concerned by the Swiss standardization process and to raise interest from government stakeholders, technical or not, companies and universities as a community in synergy when considering the advances at the OGC.