Coverage data

A coverage is the digital representation of some spatio-temporal phenomenon. ISO 19123 provides the definition:

Coverages play an important role in geographic information systems, geospatial content and services, GIS data processing, and data sharing.

A coverage is represented by its "domain" (the universe of extent) and a number of range of values representing the coverage's value at each defined location. For example, a satellite image derived from remote sensing might record varying degrees of light pollution. Aerial photography, land cover data, and digital elevation models all provide coverage data. Generally, a coverage can be multi-dimensional, such as 1-D sensor timeseries, 2-D satellite images, 3-D x/y/t image time series or x/y/z geo tomograms, or 4-D x/y/z/t climate and ocean data.

However, coverages are more general than just regularly gridded imagery. The corresponding standards (see below) address regular and irregular grids, point clouds, and general meshes.

An interoperable service definition for navigating, accessing, processing, and aggregation of coverages is provided by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Coverage Service (WCS) suite and Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS), a spatio-temporal coverage query language.

Coverages represent digital geospatial information representing space/time-varying phenomena. OGC Abstract Topic 6 - which is identical to ISO 19123 - defines an abstract model of coverages. Many implementations are conceivable which all conform to this abstract model while not being interoperable. This abstract coverage model is concretized to the level of interoperability by the OGC standard GML 3.2.1 Application Schema - Coverages (often referred to as GMLCOV) which in turn is based on the Geography Markup Language (GML) 3.2, an XML grammar written in XML Schema for the description of application schemas as well as the transport and storage of geographic information.

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