Geospatial One-Stop will have first trial in May

Proposals are due Jan. 22 from vendors that want to build the Geospatial One-Stop Portal, one of the 25 e-government initiatives, the OpenGIS Consortium Inc. announced this week. The Wayland, Mass., consortium is working with the Interior and Agriculture departments, the Federal Geographic Data Committee and NASA to set up a one-stop shop for geospatial information and online mapping.The request for quotations, at , said the portal sponsors “are backing their belief in this vision with cost-sharing funds to partially offset development costs.” Mark E. Reicherdt, the consortium’s executive director of outreach, said he could not disclose the size of the cost-sharing funds. The fundamental requirement is interoperability of software in a multivendor environment. Portal architecture specifications must use the Unified Modeling Language.Chosen participants must assemble their reusable and interoperable components within an application integration framework, demonstrate a working implementation to the sponsors in Washington next May, and make a beta version available for six months of testing.Participants will receive cost-sharing funds depending on overall quality of their proposals and how well they adhere to the requirements, the RFQ said.