INSPIRE Workshop Helsinki

"WCS is the natural way to deliver and exploit coverage data", Jordi Escriu (Cartographic and Geologcal Institut of Catalonia/Spain) said at the beginning of the hands-on workshop “Implementation of INSPIRE Coverages” helt in Helsinki/Finland.

The webinar corresponding to the Thematic Cluster #3 and #4 was presented in cooperation with Peter Baumann (rasdaman GmbH, Bremen and Jacobs University, Bremen) and Kathi Schleidt (Data Cov. E.U./Austria). The workshop adressed users and providers of any kind of geospatial raster data, and showed the benefits of raster data in coverage format, the power of the associated processing service (WCPS) in spatio-temporal raster data analytics.

Coverages are widely used in INSPIRE as an interoperable way for providing raster data ready to be exploited through datacube analytics, being presented at least in the following themes:

• Annex II: Elevation, Land cover, Orthoimagery, Geology.
• Annex III: Soil, Land use, Natural risk zones, Atmospheric conditions, Meteorological geographical features, Oceanographic geographical features, Energy resources.

Attendees were impressed by the options and possibilities WCS is offering. In his presentation INSPIRE delegate, Peter Baumann showed the ease of using WCS in a hands-on-session doing live ingest and retrieval using the reference implementation rasdaman.

The OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) standards suite defines services on coverages, a concept including spatio-temporal sensor, images (timeseries), simulation, and statistics data. In practice, coverages often represent "Big Data" as orthoimagery, elevation data, weather forecasts, and point clouds. The WCS Core establishes basic functionality all implementations must provide: access to whole coverages or parts thereof via spatial/temporal subsetting. Extensions add optional functionality, such as data format encodings (like GeoTIFF, JPEG2000, NetCDF), service model extensions (such as scaling and reprojection), and protocol bindings (GET, POST, SOAP, and REST).)

“WCS is a good example of the benefits and the potential of such kind of data and services. Worth to look at and take into account by other organizations and communities”, said Peter Baumann, head of rasdaman. He was involved as national German delegate to INSPIRE; based on a long-standing experience . He was involved in building flexible, heavy-lifting services he is editor of "Big Datacube" standards in OGC and ISO.