• Introduction
• Technical analysis
• Issues and recommendations
• European SIF

WCS 2.0

Summary

“It is recommended to INSPIRE IR DTs, GMES and GEOSS to adopt WCS 2.0 core specification plus appropriate extensions. Esp. for GEOSS and GMES the adoption of CF-netCDF extension package for WCS”

Classification

Category	Data Access and Processing
Identifier	REC-WCS-001
Type of recommended activity	Service Model
Organisations addressed	INSPIRE IR DTs, GMES, GEOSS SIF

Additional information

Context	Coverage types (i.e. specific feature types supported by geoscientists for managing and processing their observation and measurements outputs) are extremely important for all the three initiatives. However, the present international standards have several shortcomings as far as interoperability and simplicity are concerned. The next OGC WCS specification promised to sort out these obstacles by introducing a flexible and extensible specification approach. On this line, the CF-netCDF extension was proposed to comply with several Earth Sciences disciplines (e.g. meteo-oceanography, hydrology, climatology, etc). Besides, the CF-netCDF is going to become an international standard for the Earth Sciences domain.
Rationale	None
Dependencies	None
Further background information	Technology Watch Report - Data Access and Processing [PDF] Comparative analysis report (version 2) [PDF] Comparative Analysis Report (version 2) - Annex Recommendations [PDF] Website of the OGC WCS 2.0 Standards Working Group (SWG) OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) 1.1 extension for CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding
Main discussion points	None
Roadmap	None