A Specification-Oriented Geospatial Coverage Ontology Study

In earth sciences, the term "geospatial coverage" denotes a space/time-varying geographic object, that is: multi-dimensional raster data such as 2-D satellite images, 3-D or 4-D seismic data. Web coverage services (WCS) as standardized by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) provide access to such detailed and high-volume sets of information being used in a wide variety of earth system applications, such as in solar, atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere, solid earth, and biosphere research. However, different service implementations sometimes turn out to be incompatible because of incompleteness and a lack of conciseness in the current WCS 1.1.2 standard. The main reason for this is that the specification is written without formal testing procedures. To overcome this, we propose a specification-oriented Ontology for coverages. This work is a part of the development of the new WCS 2.0 standard. In this way, an improved sharing of geospatial coverage data is expected in future.