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Hi Ron & all,conceptually I find myself comfortable with the idea of a coverage being just a special case of a feature, while I also see the arguments for the opposite view. Anyway, mathematicians like Ron can teach us how unified concepts can be defined.
Practically I see that feature and coverage operations are substantially different, and it makes sense to have different services on features and coverages. WFS and WCS form two underpinning services, catalog services a third one, somehow reflecting the long-standing triad vector/raster/meta data.
Recently SWE has joined the arena, and I find it important and interesting to make sure that SWE concepts are in sync with both feature and coverage definitions (my superficial knowledge of the SWE world makes me believe that sensor data see themselves sometimes to features and sometimes to coverages, depending on data, purpose, and daylight savings time).
_Ideally_ operations on similar data structures are compatible, at least coherent (eg, sensor and coverage data subsetting). On the other hand I consider it _essential_ that the structures are in sync across specs (ie, coherent with whatever we put in OWS Common), otherwise I don't see how we can achieve cross-standard interoperability: what if two standards define and use "feature" differently, use "coverage" differently...
cheers, Peter Ron Lake wrote:
Hi Ben:I think this is also an argument that SOS, WFS and WCS be thought of as variations of one another - I think of a coverage server as a kind of WFS (even more so for SOS).
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