5 April2013 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announced a call for publiccomment on the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Coordinate Reference System (CRS)Extension Standard. 

WCSdefines an open standard interface to easily access multi-dimensional,spatio-temporal coverages, such as sensor data, satellite imagery, image timeseries, simulation data, point clouds, and meshes.

The OGCWCS CRS Extension defines an extension to the WCS Core that enables requests to specify that coverages be returnedin one of a number of different Coordinate Reference Systems. While the WCS Core defines accessonly in the coverage's Native CRS (i.e., the one in which the coverage isstored on the server), the WCS CRS Extension defines how to request and obtaina coverage in a CRS different from the Native CRS. Thisflexibility is important, for example, in exchanging data between differentenvironments.

The OGC WCS CRS Extension is free and can be downloaded from the OGCRequest for Comment page at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/100.

The OGC WCS Standards Working Group will consider all comments whenpreparing a final draft of the candidate standard. The comment period ends 5 May 2013.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies,government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating ina consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGCStandards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web,wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empowertechnology developers to make geospatial information and services accessibleand useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visitthe OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.