Standards-based services for big spatio-temporal data

Abstract

With the unprecedented availability of continuously updated measured and generated data there is an immense potential for getting new and timely insights - yet, the value is not fully leveraged as of today. The quest is up for high-level service interfaces for dissecting datasets and rejoining them with other datasets - ultimately, to allow users to ask "any question, anytime, on any size" enabling them to "build their own product on the go". With OGC Coverages, a concrete, interoperable data model has been established which unifies n-D spatio-temporal regular and irregular grids, point clouds, and meshes. The Web Coverage Service (WCS) suite provides versatile streamlined coverage functionality ranging from simple access to flexible spatio-temporal analytics. Flexibility and scalability of the WCS suite has been demonstrated in practice through massive services run by large-scale data centers. We present the current status in OGC Coverage data and service models, contrast them to related work, and describe a scalable implementation based on the rasdaman array engine.