OGC seeks public comment on Web Coverage Service (WCS)

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).