Web Coverage Service

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter.
Please help Wikipedia by improving the introduction according to the guidelines laid out at Wikipedia:Guide to layout. You can discuss the issue on the talk page.

Please wikify (format) this article or section as suggested in the Guide to layout and the Manual of Style.

Remove this template after wikifying. This article has been tagged since August 2006.

This article lacks information on the importance of the subject matter.
Please help improve this article by providing context for a general audience, especially in the lead section. This article has been tagged since September 2006. (help, talk)

An OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) extends the Web Map Server (WMS) interface to allow access to geospatial "coverages" that represent values or properties of geographic locations, rather than WMS generated maps (pictures). [1]

The Web Coverage Service supports electronic interchange 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 WMS which filters and portrays spatial data to return static maps (rendered as geo-registered pictures by the server), the Web Coverage Service provides available data together with their detailed descriptions; allows complex queries against these data; and returns data with its original semantics (instead of pictures) which can be interpreted, extrapolated, etc. -- and not just portrayed.

Unlike WFS which returns discrete geospatial features, the Web Coverage Service returns representations of space-varying phenomena that relate a spatial-temporal domain to a (possibly multidimensional) range of properties.

The specification defines three operations:

The GetCapabilities operation returns an XML document de-scribing the service and brief descriptions of the data collections from which clients may request coverages.
The DescribeCoverage operation lets clients request a full description of one or more coverages served by a particular WCS server. The server responds with an XML docu-ment that fully describes the identified coverages.
The GetCoverage operation returns a coverage (that is, values or properties of a set of geographic locations), bundled in a well-known coverage format. The GetCoverage operation of a Web Coverage Service is normally run after GetCapabilities and DescribeCoverage replies have shown what requests are allowed and what data are available. [2]