Updated WCS 2.1 Standard will simplify access to spatio-temporal ‘big datacubes’

15 February 2018: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comment on the Web Coverage Service (WCS) 2.1 candidate standard.

The OGC  Web Coverage Service (WCS) standards suite defines methodology to access coverages (regular and irregular grids, including spatio-temporal datacubes, point clouds, and general meshes) from the Web. OGC has offered WCS standards since 2005, reflecting the importance and maturity of providing such data to Web clients.

The definition of a coverage is given by the  OGC Coverage Implementation Schema (CIS). In 2017, CIS 1.1 was released as a backwards-compatible extension of coverages to CIS 1.0, with a unified grid model supporting any kind of spatio-temporal sensor, image (timeseries), simulation, and/or statistics data.

WCS 2.1 allows CIS 1.1 coverages to be served in addition to CIS 1.0 coverages. Hence, WCS 2.1 is backwards compatible with WCS 2.0: any service passing the WCS 2.1 conformance tests will also pass the WCS 2.0 tests. Further, all WCS 2.0 extensions remain applicable in the context of WCS 2.1.

By supporting the more general datacube model of CIS 1.1, the WCS 2.1 standard will simplify access to spatio-temporal ‘big datacubes’, with an operation spectrum ranging from simple subsetting in space and time up to complex spatio-temporal analytics through  Web Coverage Processing Services (WCPS).

The candidate WCS 2.1 Standard is available for review and comment at  portal.opengeospatial.org/files/77692. Comments are due by 19 March 2018 and should be submitted via the method outlined at  www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/161.  

About OGC

The Open Geospatial Consortium (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 within any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at  www.opengeospatial.org.



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