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.

About: The OGC Coverages Domain Working Group (Coverages.DWG) uses this site for providing information about standardization of coverages.The OGC Coverages.DWG is a community oriented working group established for facilitating exchange on the OGC coverage data and service standards, striving for collaboration and communication between groups with spatio-temporal modeling interests (BigData.DWG, Temporal.DWG, SensorThings, etc.).

"OGC OAPI-Coverages is the equivalent of WCS" and "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 coverage and datacube knowledge. CIS, WCS and WCPS continue being stable, mature, maintained, and heavily used. Notably, the CoverageJSON encoding is not compatible with the coverage standards, despite its name.

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.

News

• May 2026: An Executable Test Suite (ETS) for WCPS has been submitted to OGC. This is the first time an OGC query language is compliance testable.
• May 2026: ISO 19123-2:2026 Coverage Implementation Schema (CIS) specification and schema is finished, and OGC re-adoption is started.
• 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.

CoveragesDWG Web Utilities

• WebTopicList - all topics in alphabetical order
• WebChanges - recent topic changes in this web
• WebNotify - subscribe to an e-mail alert sent when topics change
• WebRss, WebAtom - RSS and ATOM news feeds of topic changes
• WebStatistics - listing popular topics and top contributors
• WebPreferences - preferences of this web

Visitors