OGC extensions to Web Coverage Service Standard improve access to Earth data

29 May 2014 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) Membershiphas approved six OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard extensionsas official OGC standards. These WCS extensions significantly expand theability of researchers, environmental managers, disaster managers, policy advisersand others to access the world's network-distributed Earth imaging data resources.

The OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard definesan interface for requesting coverage data, such as sensor data, satelliteimagery, image time series, point clouds, and TINs (triangulated irregularnetworks). The six new WCS Extensions specify standard mechanisms for providingadditional control over the processing of a coverage during its server-sideprocessing:

•  GML ApplicationSchema – Coverages – GeoTIFF Coverage Encoding Profile: Returns a coverage in GeoTIFF encoding, in addition to formats like the OGC GeographyMarkup Language (GML) Encoding Standard.

•  WCS RangeSubsetting Extension: Specifies astandard way to extract specific fields from the range set of a coverage aspart of the data request. For example, in remote sensing this is known as“band” or “channel” subsetting and in climate modeling it is called “variableextraction”.

•  WCS Scaling Extension: Specifies parameters to a request to provide controlover scaling of a coverage during its server-side processing.

•  WCS InterpolationExtension: Enables clients to specify the interpolation method that the servershall apply to a coverage.

•  WCS ProcessingExtension: Specifiesthe standard service interface to the Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) querylanguage. WCPS extends WCS functionality with a high-level query language forserver-side filtering and processing of multi-dimensional Big Data.

•  WCS EarthObservation Profile: Defines a profile of WCS 2.0 for use on Earth Observationdata.

All OGC standards are free and publicly available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards. Anoverview and downloads of the complete WCS suite are available at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wcs.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 475companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universitiesparticipating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatialstandards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that”geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstreamIT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial informationand services accessible and useful with any application that needs to begeospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

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