Web Coverage Service

As with WMS and WFS service instances, a WCS allows clients to choose portions of a server's information holdings based on spatial constraints and other query criteria.

Unlike the OGC Web Map Service (WMS), which portrays spatial data as static, server-rendered images (maps), the Web Coverage Service delivers underlying data values along with their detailed descriptions.

This enables a rich syntax for queries against the data and returns information with its original semantics, rather than just pictures, allowing for interpretation, extrapolation, and complex client-side analysis.

As such, WCS focuses on coverages as a specialized class of features and defines streamlined functionality for their retrieval.

[1][2][3] Core operations such as GetCapabilities, DescribeCoverage, and GetCoverage enable clients to request and obtain coverage data in various formats and coordinate reference systems, facilitating more sophisticated data processing and analysis scenarios than simple map portrayal.

As a result, WCS is not limited to quadrilateral grid coverages, extending beyond what earlier versions of the service supported.

This is an abstract query language (like SQL and XQuery) that is independent from any other OGC service standard.

[9] These products have successfully passed OGC compliance testing for the WCS 2.0 Interface Standard – Core: Corrigendum 2.0.1.