The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. seeks public comment on the draft OGC Web Coverage Services Interface Standard Version 2.0.  The OGC WCS standard supports electronic retrieval of geospatial data as ‘coverages’. The WCS 2.0 draft has several significant enhancements over previous versions.

WCS 2.0 is harmonized with the Geography Markup Language coverage model, leading to increased interoperability across OGC standards. Further, WCS 2.0 is highly modular and follows the core/extension design pattern, which allows for standard that is easier to understand and implement.

The SWE Common standard provides a common data encoding that is used throughout the OGC Sensor Web Enablement standards suite. More precisely, the SWE Common model is used to define the representation, nature, structure and encoding of sensor related data.

The SWE Common language is an XML implementation of this model and is used by other existing OGC Sensor Web Enablement standards such as Sensor Model Language, Sensor Observation Service, Sensor Alert Service and Sensor Planning Service.

This standard defines an interface for services that provide the ability to join attribute data stored in one database on a network with the corresponding geometry stored in another network accessible database.

For example, a table on one server may indicate the population of various cities, while a second server may contain the geometry that describes the cities’ locations and boundaries. The TJS standard describes a set of interfaces for both servers that would allow the city name to be used as the common geographic identifier in order to join the population data to its geometry, thus enabling the user to create a map or perform geospatial analysis on the tabular data. An earlier draft of this specification was called the Geographic Linkage Service.

The WCS standard defines a standard interface and operations that enable interoperable access to single or multi-dimensional geospatial coverages.  Services implementing this standard provide an interface with a standard set of operations for accessing original or derived sets of geospatial coverage information. An important aspect of the WCS standard is that it allows access and retrieval of raw, unprocessed imagery, which is often required by rendering and processing services.

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