Future Work: Progress CoverageJSON in WCS SWG

Progress CoverageJSON in WCS SWG

Coverage JSON

Coverage JSON was devised at Reading University, UK, several years ago. To make it a formal OGC standard is now a work item in the newly re-chartered Web Coverage Service Standard Working Group.

The original specification adopted a single dimension array implementation to represent multiple dimensional arrays, of size n x m x .... A client can readily access the array multidimensionally for processing and display. This approach was adopted because of the use of JSON-LD 1.0 to access metadata, which did not support links from nested JSON objects. This approach was successful and effective in that there are several implementations in wide use across the scientific communities.

Now that JSON-LD 1.1 has been released, it is possible that a more strict multi-dimensional approach could be adopted, though the JSON nesing of objects that is required may introduce unacceptable processing overheads. The adavntage would be possible full alignment with OGC CIS JSON.