Web Coverage Service

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Web Coverage Service (WCS)

The Web Coverage Service is an Open Geospatial Consortium standard web service for exchanging geospatial data. WCS 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. This is in contrast to a Web Feature Service (WFS), which returns actual vector data, and a Web Map Service (WMS) which produces a digital image file. WCS provides three operations:

• GetCapabilities: The GetCapabilities operation returns an XML document de-scribing the service and brief descriptions of the data collections from which clients may request coverages. Clients would generally run the GetCapabilities operation and cache its result for use throughout a session, or reuse it for multiple sessions. If GetCapabilities cannot return descriptions of its available data, information from a separate image catalog source is used.

• GetCoverage: The GetCoverage operation of WCS is normally run after GetCapabilities and DescribeCoverage replies have shown what requests are allowed and what data are available. The GetCoverage operation returns a coverage (that is, values or properties of a set of geographic locations), bundled in a well-known coverage format. Its syntax and semantics bear some resemblance to the WMS GetMap and WFS GetFeature requests, but several extensions support the retrieval of coverages rather than static maps or discrete features.

• DescribeCoverage: 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 document that fully describes the identified coverages.

MapServer implements WCS.