Open Geospatial Consortium Common Database (OGC CDB)

Governments and defense forces are increasingly looking to high performance synthetic environments to accomplish more of their training, mission rehearsal and decision support requirements. Training devices such as flight simulators have traditionally required a variety of different and unique databases to provide a synthetic representation of the world. Having many unique databases for each simulation system, however, creates a number of challenges, such as correlating the databases or making rapid changes to the databases to support training and mission rehearsal requirements.

CAE has developed an approach and architecture for database publication called the common database (CDB). The CDB is a shared, open and public database that defines a single synthetic representation of the world, and all simulation systems use the same database – the CDB. The CDB is used as a run-time data repository from which the various simulation clients simultaneously retrieve relevant information to perform their respective run-time simulation tasks. The bottom line result is that with the CDB, the creation, modification and correlation of run-time databases can take minutes or hours instead of days, weeks or months. Just as importantly, these changes can be made very rapidly using the latest intelligence and source data available.

Since the completion of the original contracts under which the CDB was developed, the CDB specification has been maintained and updated by an industry-led board. In early 2015, it was decided to submit the CDB to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®), an independent, international consensus-based standards development organization, for their consideration as an eventual OGC standard. In September 2016, the OGC formally approved the CDB as a standard and it is now referred to as the OGC CDB. The adoption of the CDB as an OGC standard brings together the geospatial intelligence and modelling and simulation industries to establish greater interoperability in the use of geospatial data.