OGC announces standard that makes complex environmental data easier to use in GIS

- The membership of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has approved the OGC CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding using GML Coverage Application Schema, an extension to the OGC CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding standard.

The OGC CF-netCDF 3.0 encoding standard has emerged as a widely used and well supported data model and encoding for domains such as atmospheric science, oceanography, climatology, meteorology, and hydrology. It supports multi-dimensional data representing space and time-varying phenomena.

The new extension to the OGC CF-netCDF standards suite specifies how CF-netCDF datasets are encoded to conform to “OGC Implementation Schema for Coverages." Coverages are data such as the output of weather and climate forecast models, weather station and ocean buoy observations, balloon soundings, ground-base radar, satellite imagery, digital elevation models, and LIDAR point clouds. This extension specifies how these complex multi-dimensional CF-netCDF data are encoded as OGC coverages for use in geographic information systems (GIS) or other geospatial systems.

The documents for the OGC netCDF-GMLCOV Standard are available at www.opengeospatial.org/standards/netcdf.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 515 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 atwww.opengeospatial.org.