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. While the formats are human readable, it is impossible to write a generic reader that can read any data and properly convert it into the format that data processing applications actually use. Even if the data is in netcdf format, it's still lacking semantics.

A 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, which is a daunting task. The converter to the above binary files at datafed is almost 500 lines of python. That's a substantial investment and waste of human resources.

The importance NetCDF Conventions

NetCDF is a fine format when it comes to syntax. The library tells you what the variables and their dimensions are, and can get you the data with ease. The NetCDF conventions help programs to understand how that data relates to real world. Most important is perhaps the dimensionality: Where is a data point in the four dimensional physical world.

A typical quite successful case of a crucial convention is GeoTIFF, a TIFF image with geographical projection in it. With a plain PNG image, you'd have to know yourself what the projection is, with GeoTIFF it's in the image itself.

This means no more scripting. Open a NetCDF file with your program, and the convention guides the applications.

The OWS system is promoting NetCDF Climate and Forecast (CF) Metadata Convention and it's latest version CF-1.5

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

Catalog.aspx
browser.aspx
plug'n play processing