WAYLAND, MA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- Nov 16, 2010 -- The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces adoption and availability of the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard, Version 2.0. The WCS 2.0 standard is available for free download at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wcs.

The OGC WCS 2.0 standard defines a standard interface and operations that enable interoperable access to geospatial coverages. "Coverages" ( http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/glossary/c) are digital geospatial information representing space/time-varying phenomena, such as sensor data, satellite imagery, digital elevation models, and climate/ocean data. Services implementing this standard provide an interface with a standard set of operations for accessing original or derived sets of geospatial coverage information.

The WCS 2.0 standard has several significant enhancements over previous versions. WCS 2.0 is harmonized with the Geography Markup Language (GML) coverage model, leading to increased interoperability across OGC standards. Further, WCS 2.0 supports all GML and ISO coverage types, therefore extending WCS from pure raster data to point clouds, curvilinear grids, general meshes, and more coverage types. Additionally, WCS 2.0 is highly modular and follows the OGC's new Modular Specification Policy, which describes a design pattern that makes standards easier to understand and implement.

An important aspect of the WCS standard is that it allows access and retrieval of raw, unprocessed data, which is often required by rendering and processing services. Further information can be found at the WCS Service page of the OGC Network ( http://www.ogcnetwork.net/wcs).

The WCS 2.0 submission team includes representatives from:

• BAE Systems
• ERDAS
• GMU
• Jacobs University Bremen
• National Center for Atmospheric Research
• Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
• NOAA
• Oracle
• PCI Geomatics
• Spot Image

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 400 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

Contact: 

Steven Ramage
Executive Director, Marketing and Communications
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
Bergen, Norway

Email Contact
Phone: +47 9862 6865