WCS Wrapper About

About OpenGeoSpatial Web Services

The OGC Web Services like WCS, Web Coverage Service and WMS, Web Map Service, were designed to allow dynamic client-server interoperability between applications.

The most successful of them, WMS is widely used due to a crucial property: It's output is an image. All the web browsers can display images, people understand images. If it just was like that for everything! Unfortunately that is not the case.

The General Problem of data sharing

There are a lot of sites that have data available in numeric formats, binary or text format. While the formats are human readable, they unfortunately require a programmer to write a script that can read the data. Even if the data is in netcdf format, it's impossible to write a generic reader that can read the data and properly convert it into the format that data processing applications actually use.

This is the result of missing semantics: An NetCDF array has syntactic properties like its dimensions and data type, but no semantic interpretation what they actually mean. Computing latitude, longitude and time to pm25[457,34,98] is easy once you know how to compute it. You need a human to create a reading script for every kind of file format.

This is a daunting task. The converter to the above binary files at datafed is almost 500 lines of python. That's a substantial investment.

The importance CF Conventions

Everyone needs to write the metadata for their files.

Creating the First WCS based on WCS 1.1.0

Goal being zero-configuration system, based on CF

Adding Point Data

What is station time series and how it's done

Benefits of WCS standard versus just using cgi queries

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