OGC Spatio-Temporal Coverage / Datacube Standards

Coverages: As per OGC, ISO, and INSPIRE standardization, coverages constitute a unifying paradigm for the digital representations 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, and general meshes. 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, and more.

Coverage Implementation Schema (CIS), the WCS coverage service suite, and the WCPS geo datacube query language continue being stable, mature, maintained, and heavily used. Notably, the CoverageJSON encoding is not compatible with the coverage standards, despite its name.

  • "OGC OAPI-Coverages is the equivalent of WCS" and "RED%"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

Resources

This coverages info pool provides a one-stop shop for information around the coverage and datacube standards including a continuously updated News section.

About

Contact: Maintainer of this wiki is Peter Baumann (Constructor University, Large-Scale Scientific Information Systems Research Group and rasdaman GmbH); further contributors are welcome.

This site can also be reached via shortcut https://myogc.org/go/coveragesDWG.

CoveragesDWG Web Utilities

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Topic revision: r102 - 18 Oct 2026, PeterBaumann
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