Web Coverage Service 2.0 Standard

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announces adoption and avail ability of the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard, Version 2.0. The WCS 2.0 standard is available for free download. The OGC WCS 2.0 standard defines a standard interface and operations that enable interoperable access to geospatial coverages.

Coverages are digital geospatial information representing space/time-varying phenomena, such as sensor data, satellite imagery, digital elevation models, and climate/ocean data. Services implementing this standard provide an interface with a standard set of operations for accessing original or derived sets of geospatial coverage information.

The WCS 2.0 standard has several significant enhancements over previous versions. WCS 2.0 is harmonised with the Geography Markup Language (GML) coverage model, leading to increased interoperability across OGC standards. Further, WCS 2.0 supports all GML and ISO coverage types, therefore extending WCS from pure raster data to point clouds, curvilinear grids, general meshes, and more coverage types. Additionally, WCS 2.0 is highly modular and follows the OGC's new Modular Specification Policy, which describes a design pattern that makes standards easier to understand and implement.

An aspect of the WCS standard is that it allows access and retrieval of raw, unprocessed data, which is often required by rendering and processing services.