Beyond rasters
Peter Baumann · 2010
In the classical triad of vector, raster, and meta data, it is the raster part which is not yet sufficiently supported in SDIs nowadays. Consequently, integration of earth observation imagery, LIDAR, legacy map scans, etc. into Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) remains incomplete. In terms of standards, the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Standard defines open interfaces for accessing and processing of raster data, more generally: coverages. In August 2010, the completely overhauled WCS 2.0 has been adopted by OGC. To make coverages interchangeable across all OGC-based services, WCS 2.0 has been based on Geography Markup Language (GML) 3.2.1, with a small, backwards compatible addition to achieve informational completeness. In parallel to specification writing, its reference implementation and an online demo are being pursued.