Status and Prospects in Geo Raster Service Standardization

Abstract

Increasingly raster data are becoming integral component of geo services, since today’s hardware and software technology is powerful enough to allow online access even to objects of Terabyte to Petabyte size. The logical next step from standalone geo Web services are interoperable, community-sharable archive networks, and this raises the question of standardised access interfaces. The Open GeoSpatial Consortium (OGC) develops and promotes geo raster services as part of their geo service standards. Recently version 1.1 of the Web Coverage Service (WCS) has been released, and the Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) as a dynamic value-adding raster processing service is under preparation. Both WCS and WCPS are presented in this contribution. The author ist active member of the OGC WCS Revision Working Group, Chair of the WCPS Working Group, and Co-Chair of the Coverages Working Group.