The Use Case:

OGC in 2019 has decided to establish a new family of geo data interfaces, based on OpenAPI and a modified RESTful approach, and unifying vector, coverage, processing, and other APIs under a common scheme. The coverages API, OAPI-Coverages, relies on the OGC Coverage Implementation Schema (CIS) 1.1, the current coverage data standard. Specs are developed and maintained in a public github repository.

The service:

The rasdaman team is involved form the beginning an contributing substantially, with a focus of achieving meaningful, consistent, intuitive, and powerful coverage services. rasdaman was among the first to not only shape, but also implement the concepts at an early, yet immature stage. Further, rasdaman was first to demonstrate WCPS over OAPI-Coverages. The demo situations below have been presented at the January 2020 ESIP/OGC Coverage Analytics Workshop as the first working datacube service accessible via OAPI-Coverages.

As it turns out, the conceptual model of OAPI-Coverages, being based on the proven OGC CIS data model, can be made a fit with the OGC coverage service model, WCS. Already now, WCS supports different protocol bindings for the same abstract functionality (both core and extensions). Hence, OAPI-Coverages can easily be added as another WCS protocol extension, next to GET/KVP, XML/POST, and SOAP.

Caveat: The specification still has some known shortcomings, is under discussion, and not yet an adopted standard. Hence,the request syntax shown here may be subject to unannounced changes.

  • Coverage subsetting:
  • WCPS coverage processing, involving spatial subsetting and colorizing 2D Germany Digital Elevation Model (DEM):