rasdaman newsletter 10/2020
Coverages, Demystified: New Tutorial One-Stop-Shop
While coverage standards recently have become a center of attention due to their raster service capabilities there are still widespread misconceptions, based on a lack of knowledge. The EarthServer datacube federation, relying itself heavily on the datacube standards, has established a comprehensive set of tutorials for all levels, "from zero to hero".
"Coverages are complicated" is a common myth, in particular propagated by service providers not willing to support these open raster standards. Fact is that there is a homogeneous standards platform across OGC, ISO, and INSPIRE based on the OGC/ISO Coverage Implementation Schema (CIS) and the corresponding service suite, Web Coverage Service (WCS) with its datacube analytics language, WCPS.
The fast-growing EarthServer open datacube federation, using these standards at a large scale, has now published an introduction to coverage data and services. "We want to show the simplicity and productivity gain potential of coverage services - the know-how and technology is readily available, and it's free and open", says Peter Baumann, editor of the coverage standards in OGC and ISO. There is a comprehensive primer together with a large sorted link list to videos, slides, articles, interactive demos, and large-scale services altogether constitutes the maybe most comprehensive introduction to coverage services on the Web.
Aside from the general training on CIS and WCS / WCPS there is special emphasis on INSPIRE Coverage Download Services based on WCS while duly considering INSPIRE metadata answering questions like:
- What do INSPIRE coverage metadata look like?
- What is the correct INSPIRE coverage representation?
- How to build an INSPIRE-conformant WCS?
Tutorial references and hands-on-demos help getting up to speed with datacube and INSPIRE coverage standards. EU member states shall implement the INSPIRE directive by October 2020, says the INSPIRE roadmap, so this is a good time to reap insights available. The interactive demo site educates on and demonstrates INSPIRE coverage services, established by a team of key OGC and INSPIRE experts and powered by OGC-certified rasdaman.
Links: https://earthserver.xyz/wcs and https://inspire-wcs.eu