Applying WCO ontology to geospatial web coverage services

A steadily increasing data tsunami is rolling over us, to a large extent consisting of sensor, image, and statistics data acquired in earth, space, life, and social sciences, to name but a few. Sampled data appear as multi-dimensional raster data - often time series -, but also as point clouds. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) notion of a coverage describes geo raster data and more, such as meshes, trajectories, and surfaces. A current challenge is to use such services in automatically orchestrating mash-ups. The indispensable prerequisite, inter-operability, however, is hindered by the large diversity of data formats and corresponding data models. In this paper we present our ongoing work on a semantic representation of coverage data and service standards. We present a Web Coverage Ontology (WCO) and investigate how to apply WCO to geospatial web coverage services (WCS). By integrating coverages into the semantic landscape we aim at automatic discovery of, composition of, and reasoning about geo coverage services.