rasdaman newsletter 10/2016

INSPIRE Conference 2016

September 2016. Europe, on its quest for a harmonized Spatial Data Infrastructure, has held its annual INSPIRE conference in Barcelona from 26 to 30 September. Highlight was the presentation of INSPIRE WCS, crafted under the lead of British Geological Survey. INSPIRE Editor Jordi Escriu concluded: "If you have raster data you should use WCS" after experiencing live the ease of ingest and download through INSPIRE WCS Reference Implementation, rasdaman.

On Monday 26, "Choosing the Right INSPIRE Download Service Technologies" initiated discussion. Next, large-scale practice proofs of WCS were presented in the session "Improving access to big data through OGC standard interfaces - a hands on WC(P)S session", based on 150+ Terabyte services and intercontinental datacube fusion. Over the next days, a lot of conference attendees took the opportunity to visit the INSPIRE booth and, next toit, the EarthServer booth.

On Thursday 29, "Integrating INSPIRE into a single seamless information space" highlighted the integration power of the WCS suite. Finally, on Friday 30th "Implementation and potential of INSPIRE coverage data and WCS" summarized and deepened the topic. Live demos based on rasdaman which hasbeen chosen as INSPIRE WCS Reference Implementation.

WCS has proven itself through several years as an OGC standard for regular and irregular grids, such as imagery, elevation data, climate data, andmany more spatio-temporal data. The modular suite of standards enables data access, extraction, download - up to versatile analytics with OGC WebCoverage Processing Service (WCPS). Based on the unifying concept of coverages, data homogenization and service integration is achieved. The OGC coverage data and service model currently is on the way of becoming the lingua franca in Big Earth Data being adopted by INSPIRE as well as ISO. Both the leading open-source and proprietary tools support WCS, with rasdaman being the only fully comprehensive implementation of the WCS suite, in particular with its award-winning multi-dimensional parallel, distributed array engine.