Spatio-Temporal Coverage & Datacube Standards
Enabling Big Earth Data Interoperability.
Spatio-Temporal Big Data
Coverages
Coverages constitute a unifying paradigm for the digital representation of space/time varying phenomena, in physics called "field" (as in "magnetic field").
Technically, such phenomena are represented as spatio-temporal regular and irregular grids, point clouds, or general meshes. Obviously, coverages are of prime importance to model both sensor data (such as satellite imagery) and simulation output (such as weather forecasts).
In particular, multi-dimensional datacubes fall under this category, such as
- 1-D sensor time series,
- 2-D satellite imagery,
- 3-D x/y/t image time series and x/y/z geoscientific models,
- 4-D x/y/z/t climate and ocean data sets, etc.
Interoperability
Coverage & Datacube Standards
Many questions reach us on coverages and datacubes, being main drivers of standardization since 20+ years. This site, which is a service kindly offered to the community by Constructor University and rasdaman GmbH, offers in-depth information on the ISO / OGC coverage standards - from primer, further resources, FAQ, news and standardization progress. It addresses the coverage data model, Coverage Implemetation Schema (CIS), as well as its harmonized service model, the Web Coverage Service (WCS) modular suite of standards combined with the Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) geo datacube query language, which is also adopted by ISO.
This site is a sister site of the OGC Coverages.DWG public wiki.
Coverages form a critical pillar for interoperable spatio-temporal data access and analytics. The key coverage standards - CIS, WCS, and WCPS - are stable, mature, maintained, and heavily used - check the News! Expert voices confirm this:
- "OGC OAPI-Coverages is the equivalent of WCS", "WCS 2.0 was very, very close to the principles and implementation of an OGC API" -- Andrea Aime, GeoSolutions, on YouTube
- "Web developers who have not heard of OGC standards before immediately feel at home with these coverage standards" -- Stephan Siemen, ECMWF
- "WCS is the natural way to deliver and exploit coverage data." -- Jordi Escriu, Facilitator INSPIRE Thematic Cluster #3: Elevation, Orthoimagery, Reference systems and Geographical grids
- "As a WCS the data is of most value" -- Perry Peterson, Pyxis Innovation
- "CIS 1.1 is what I've been waiting for." -- Kathi Schleidt, INSPIRE expert
Quick Start
Resources
From zero to hero with coverages and datacubes:
Coverages Progress
News
- June 2026: 19123-2:2026 has entered the OGC adoption pipeline to become the next OGC CIS specification
- January 2026: 19123-2 DIS ballot finalizes: 100% YES, 0% NO, so adopted as new ISO CIS standard -- next: re-adoption by OGC as CIS 1.2
- October 2025: 19123-2 FDIS ballot commences in ISO
- October 2025: WCS-Interpolation enhancement finally adopted and published
- June 2025: ballot comments are worked in, submitting 19123-2 for DIS ballot
- March 2025: ISO CD ballot on 19123-2 ends with zero NO votes
- March 2025: OGC starts the Public Comment Period for the WCS Interpolation standard enhancement
- January 2025: OAB accepts an enhancement to the WCS Interpolation extension, previously adopted by the OGC Coverages.SWG with no objection to unanimous consent
- Fall 2024: OGC adopts ISO 19123-1 and 19123-3 as Abstract Topic 6.1 and 6.3, replacing the original Abstract Topic 6
- August 2024: OGC announces Validation Tools August 2024 Release of Beta environment, among others with an update of the WCS 2.0 test suites - thanks, Dirk Stenger & team
- June 2024: Functional enhancement to WCS proposed: interpolated slicing at slice points between grid positions
- June 2024: 19123-1 and 19123-3 have finished adoption cycle to become Abstract Topic 6, soon to be published
- September 2023: OGC adoption of 19123-1 and 19123-3 as new Abstract Topic 6 started
- June 2023: 19123-1 and 19123-3 adopted by ISO TC211 without any NO vote
- February 2023: 19123-1 and 19123-3 presented at OGC TC meeting to Coverages.SWG and Architecture.DWG
- November 2022: 19123-1 and 19123-3 out for FDIS ballot, following resolution of 19111-related comments in tight collaboration with UK
- March 2022: 19123-1 and 19123-3 successfully pass DIS ballot; UK comments about 19111 use to be resolved
- October 2021: 19123-3 (draft) submitted by the editing team for DIS ballot
- August 2021: Following a positive ballot with overwhelming support by the nations, ISO accepts 19123-3 as an NWIP to establish coverage processing fundamentals, based on the twin specification 19123-1 defining the abstract coverage model.
- June 2021: the rasdaman-based INSPIRE coverage portal, https://inspire-wcs.eu, gets endorsed as the (single) official Good Practice for INSPIRE coverages.
- November 2020: MIG-T has adopted the INSPIRE coverage portal, https://inspire-wcs.eu, as a candidate good practice. INSPIRE-WCS is based on OGC CIS, WCS and WCPS
- November 2020: Delegations had no objection to ISO WD 19123-1, so it can move on to next level, Committee Draft (CD)
- June 2020: ISO TC211 WG6 has distributed a Working Draft of 19123-1, the forthcoming abstract coverage standard complementing the concrete 19123-2 = OGC CIS.
- 2019: WCS 2.1 have been adopted, together with updates in the corresponding WCS extensions. This adds CIS 1.1 GeneralGridCoverage as a unified, simplified coverage type encompassing all raster / gridded coverage types. Further, WCPS 1.1 is established.
- July 2019: ISO adopts SQL/MDA (Multi-Dimensional Arrays) as 9075-15:2019. This Part 15 of SQL adds datacube analytics into the database language. Note that OGC WCPS is structurally equivalent to SQL/MDA (WCPS requests can be transformed automatically into SQL), however WCPS adds spatial and temporal semantics whereas MDA is domain-agnostic and can handle Earth, Space, and Life science data.
- September 2017: At the Southampton TC meeting the Coverages.DWG has moved to approve establishing a Datacube Domain Working Group; close collaboration between the Coverages.DWG and the forthcoming Datacube.DWG is planned as the OGC datacube standard is the Coverage Implementation Schema.
- April 2017: CIS 1.1 is adopted by OGC as an Interface Standard. This opens the way for introducing CIS 1.1 to ISO to become the next version of ISO 19123-2.
Visitors
Legal
Terms of Reference
This site is created and maintained by Peter Baumann, a key shaper of the coverage standards in OGC and ISO since 20+ years.
Contact: Peter Baumann, pbaumann@constructor.university
Responsible Maintainer Entity: Constructor University Bremen gGmbH, Campus Ring 1, 28759 Bremen
Images
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External Links
All external links implemented on this site have been checked for conformance with the spirit and intent of this site, and have found conformant at this time. However, the maintainer of this site has no control over the (change of) contents of the referred websites and, therefore, does not assume any responsibility for the contents of referred websites.
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