Web Coverage Service (WCS)

Purpose

This topic serves for information about and discussion of the Web Coverage Service (WCS) standards suite.

Background

"The Web Coverage Service (WCS) supports electronic retrieval of geospatial data as "coverages" – that is, digital geospatial information representing space-varying phenomena.

A WCS provides access to potentially detailed and rich sets of geospatial information, in forms that are useful for client-side rendering, multi-valued coverages, and input into scientific models and other clients. The WCS may be compared to the OGC Web Map Service (WMS) and the Web Feature Service (WFS); like them it allows clients to choose portions of a server's information holdings based on spatial constraints and other criteria.

Unlike the WMS [OGC 06-042], which portrays spatial data to return static maps (rendered as pictures by the server), the Web Coverage Service provide s available data together with their detailed descriptions; defines a rich syntax for requests against these data; and returns data with its original semantics (instead of pictures) which may be interpreted, extrapolated, etc. – and not just portrayed.

Unlike WFS [OGC 04-094], which returns discrete geospatial features, the Web Coverage Service returns coverages representing space-varying phenomena that relate a spatio-temporal domain to a (possibly multidimensional) range of properties."

-- WCS 1.1.2 [OGC 07-067r3]

Contents

This page hosts non-normative material about WCS, such as:

• general information
  • The following OGC Working Groups are directly concerned with coverages:
    • Web Coverage Service (WCS) Standards Working Group (WCS.SWG) -- purpose: maintenance and further development of the WCS implementation specification (Working Group chairs: Steven Keens, Peter Baumann)
    • Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) Group -- purpose: development of the WCPS implementation specification (Working Group chair: Peter Baumann)
    • Coverages Working Group -- purpose: general discussion about coverage-related topics (Working Group chairs: Peter Baumann, Charles Roswell)
  • The following OGC specifications make use of WCS:
    • Sensor Web Enablement (SWE)
    • (to be completed)
• comments and discussion
• groups engaged in WCS
  • The GALEON 2 network is regularly participating in the WCS.SWG telecon meetings once in a month (summaries)
  • List of WCS Servers (and a few clients too) as maintained by Ben Domenico for GALEON.
• best practice / application reports
  • UCL's ICEDS service includes a Guidelines document on the installation, data preparation, and set-up needed to serve global datasets such as SRTM at full resolution by WCS as well as WMS. The document focuses on the use of FOSS tools such as the Minnesota Map Server.
• URLs of operational WCS
  • UCL's ICEDS service's WCS GetCapabilities URL is http://iceds.ge.ucl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/icedswcs?SERVICE=WCS&REQUEST=GetCapabilities.

    The service contains SRTM v1 DEM data and Landsat 5 (~1990) unstretched but mosaiced imagery (provided to UCL by the Cartographic Applications Group at JPL) for Europe, Africa and North America in bands 1,2,3 + band 4 for Europe.

• any further WCS-related material available on the Web

Official releases of WCS specifications are available from the OGC website: http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wcs

Disclaimer

This website contains statements by both members of the WCS Standards Working Group (WCS.SWG) and other groups and individuals. Any opinions expressed by members of the WCS.SWG are reflecting their individual position. Under no circumstance any information provided here can be interpreted as normative or as a statement on directions any OGC specification (in particular: the WCS suite) is taking, is likely to be taken, or is intended to be taken. Further, no information provided here can be interpreted as endorsed by OGC. Finally, links from this page to web space outside the domain of the OGC do not constitute any endorsement or support for the contents of the web page / site referenced; generally speaking, OGC is not responsible in any way for the contents of such sites.