Geospatial industry standards organisation the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has released a new standard to regulate the way geospatial information is accessed online.

The OGC Web Coverage Service 2.0 interface standard covers operations that enable access to geospatial information such as sensor data, satellite imagery, digital elevation models, and climate and ocean data.

Users implementing this standard provide an interface with a standard set of operations for accessing original or derived sets of geospatial information.
The OGC says the standard is an improvement on previous versions because it is harmonised with the Geography Mark-up Language (GML) coverage model, leading to increased interoperability across OGC standards.

It also 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.

An important aspect of the WCS standard is that it allows access and retrieval of raw, unprocessed data, which is often required by firms rendering and processing geospatial information.

Further information can be found at the WCS Service page of the OGC Network.