Web Coverage Service
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The Open Geospatial Consortium Web Coverage Service Interface Standard (WCS) provides an interface allowing requests for geographical coverages across the web using platform-independent calls. The coverages are objects (or images) in a geographical area, whereas the WMS interface or online mapping portals like Google Maps return only an image, which end-users cannot edit or spatially analyze.
The OGC membership defined and maintains the WCS specification. Among implementations are a Open Source WCS reference implementation, called GeoServer.
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[edit] Overview
The basic Web Coverage Service allows querying and retrieval of coverages.
A WCS describes discovery, query, or data transformation operations. The client generates the request and posts it to a web feature server using HTTP. The web feature server then executes the request. The WCS specification uses HTTP as the distributed computing platform, although this is not a hard requirement.
There are two encodings defined for WCS operations:
In the taxonomy of Web Services, WCS is best categorized as a non-RESTful RPC type service.
[edit] Data
Data may be available in several formats, such as DTED, GeoTIFF, HDF-EOS, or NITF.
Several types of data layers are supported:
- series of points, such as locations of samples
- regular grid of pixels or points, which might represent a photo
- set of segmented curves, often used for road paths
- set of Thiessen polygons, used to analyse spatially distributed data such as rainfall measurements
- triangulated irregular network(TIN), often used for terrain models
Ranges of information may be attached to locations, such as average wind speed or yield by crop type.
[edit] Software support for WCS
The Compliance and Interoperability Test Engine (CITE) is used to test reference implementations for OGC specs, including WCS. List of software that supports WCS as a client and/or server:
- Geomatica Web Server Suite - client and server see details
- GeoServer - server (serve WCS)
- gvSIG - client (read WCS)
- GDAL - client (read WCS), see details
- GeoMedia - client (read WCS) and server (GeoMedia WebMap)
- MapServer - server (see details)
- ArcGIS Server - server ([1])
- GIS Portal Toolkit - Client ([2])
- ArcGIS Desktop - Client ([3])
[edit] See also
[edit] References
[edit] External links
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