Blue: CoverageCollection Coverage ollection overview (non-normative) It is not uncommon for a WCS server to expose many hundreds, if not thousands, of coverages. For example: A satellite instrument may provide many individual images, each a coverage, that may be composed into a single mosaic. The execution of a numerical weather prediction model may produce data for many physical quantities. Furthermore, operational meteorologists often work with the results of numerical weather prediction models as a set of 2-dimensional (one ‘fields’ for each physical quantity at each time-step and vertical level) rather than more complex 4-dimensional datasets. The resulting dataset can easily number in the thousands. A Coverageollection is a useful mechanism for grouping together coverages into a collection. The pattern is similar to a feature collection. Each Coverageis a single, uniquely identified resource specifying the member coverages. Furthermore, each member coverage within a Coverage similar characteristics such as provenance Use of Coverageresources means that it becomes simpler to refer to an aggregate set of coverage resources (e.g. using the identifier) and that common metadata can be attributed to the Coverageresource itself. A Coverageresource may contain other Coverageresources- thus enabling coverages to be grouped in arbitrarily nested sets. Where a WCS server is able to suppress information about individual coverages in its getCapabilities response, the XML document provided by the WCS end-point may be significantly smaller and easier to parse- thus mitigating challenges arising from working with very large XML documents. In such situations, a client application may gather information the Coverageresources from a WCS server, and then subsequently request information about the member coverages of a given Coverage- a subset of the complete set of coverages available from that WCS
Blue: CoverageCollection Coverage ollection overview (non-normative) It is not uncommon for a WCS server to expose many hundreds, if not thousands, of coverages. For example: A satellite instrument may provide many individual images, each a coverage, that may be composed into a single mosaic. The execution of a numerical weather prediction model may produce data for many physical quantities. Furthermore, operational meteorologists often work with the results of numerical weather prediction models as a set of 2-dimensional ‘fields’ (one for each physical quantity at each time-step and vertical level) rather than more complex 4-dimensional datasets. The resulting dataset can easily number in the thousands. A Coverageollection is a useful mechanism for grouping together coverages into a collection. The pattern is similar to a feature collection. Each Coverageis a single, uniquely identified resource specifying the member coverages. Furthermore, each member coverage within a Coverage similar characteristics such as provenance Use of Coverageresources means that it becomes simpler to refer to an aggregate set of coverage resources (e.g. using the identifier) and that common metadata can be attributed to the Coverageresource itself. A Coverageresource may contain other Coverageresources- thus enabling coverages to be grouped in arbitrarily nested sets. Where a WCS server is able to suppress information about individual coverages in its getCapabilities response, the XML document provided by the WCS end-point may be significantly smaller and easier to parse- thus mitigating challenges arising from working with very large XML documents. In such situations, a client application may gather information the Coverageresources from a WCS server, and then subsequently request information about the member coverages of a given Coverage- a subset of the complete set of coverages available from that WCS
15-044r4_WCS2.1_Coverage_Collection_Extension.docx