The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks comment on a GeoTIFF extension to the OGC GML Coverages (GMLCOV) 1.0 Standard and on a GeoTIFF extension to the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) 2.0 Standard, based on the former.

The OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard is a widely used XML encoding for geospatial data of all types. OGC “coverages”, which can be encoded in GML, associate positions within a bounded space to feature attribute values. Examples of these geospatial coverages include Earth images, referenced and non-referenced rasters, curvilinear grids, and point clouds.

The OGC GML 3.2.1 Application Schema – Coverages (GMLCOV), based on OGC Abstract Topic 6 (which is identical to ISO 19123), provides a unified method for encoding OGC coverages in GML, the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) Common Standard, and the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard. As GMLCOV is independent of a particular service definition, it allows coverage data to be exchanged through different types of services that implement these OGC standards.

To provide maximum flexibility in sharing coverage data, the GML Coverages GeoTIFF extension provides a way to encode coverages that are represented in encoding formats other than GML, such as GeoTIFF. The WCS 2.0 GeoTIFF extension binds the former extension to WCS 2.0 to allow usage of GeoTIFF encoded coverages with WCS. The OGC seeks public comment on the OGC documents describing the candidate GMLCOV and WCS extension standards for encoding GeoTIFF data in GMLCOV and using them with WCS. These documents are free and can be downloaded fromhttp://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/92 .The deadline for comments is 29 November 2012.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 465 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.