European Commission INSPIRE announcement | video recording

How can gridded data be efficiently shared and utilized?

Gridded data, often in the form of remote sensing imagery as well as weather and climate data (more generally: multi-dimensional raster data) have long been an essential part of spatial data infrastructures. For this purpose, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) have created both the OGC Coverage Implementation Schema (CIS) data model and the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) service model, providing an efficient and compact method of structuring such data paired with a powerful service for data provision.

Coverages appear across many INSPIRE themes in Annex II and III; unfortunately, due to encoding issues, it was not possible to provide the data pertaining to these models via WCS. Since 2014 a number of OGC, ISO and INSPIRE experts have teamed up in the scope of the activities of the INSPIRE Community Forum to identify the related issues and overcome the drawbacks by establishing best practices, evaluated and demonstrated through sample services. The outcome of this work is available from https://inspire-wcs.eu/ and has been endorsed by MIG-T as an INSPIRE good practice candidate. The present event constitutes the outreach webinar for this initiative, according to the procedure established for endorsing INSPIRE good practices.

In this workshop, participants will be walked through all stages of the coverage provision and usage process. Starting with a simple orthoimagery data file in GeoTIFF format, participants will learn how to create the necessary additional INSPIRE metainformation as well as how to import both the rastered data as well as the metainformation to a WCS instance. Once the data has been imported, the participants will then see the power of WCS in allowing the user to query and process the data as required for subsequent portrayal.

Agenda

• Introduction
• Coverage basics and Standards
  In this section, we will present a short overview of the relevant concepts and underlying OGC standards on which the good practice is based. The audience will receive information on the background of coverage standards as well as gaining an understanding of how this standard structures the data in an interoperable manner.
• Coverages in INSPIRE
  In this section, the audience will learn about the INSPIRE data models and their relation to OGC compliant INSPIRE Coverage data and service implementation, current issues pertaining to the provision of coverages in INSPIRE as well as the solutions proposed by the INSPIRE Coverage Good Practice.
• Deployment: Data Sets and Demos
  Having explained the basics, this section will focus on doing. First we will demonstrate how to create the necessary INSPIRE metainformation and import a raster data file to WCS. For this example, we will utilize orthoimagery data provided and mosaicked by ICGC (Institut Cartogràfic i Geològic de Catalunya, Spain) captured by the multispectral sensor (MSI) of the Sentinel-2 as part of the Copernicus program of the European Space Agency (ESA). Once the data is available, we will show how one can access and process this data as required.
• Using Coverages:
  INSPIRE data in action - live demo showing how the data ingested above can be accessed and portrayed. The power of WCS pertaining to subsetting as well as the various functionalities offered by WCPS for data transformation and fusion will be demoed, showing users how such data can be integrated into their organizational data landscape.
• Conclusions & Outlook
• Discussions and next steps