Quoting OGC PRESS RELEASE:

"OGC extensions to Web Coverage Service Standard improve access to Earth data

29 May 2014 - The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) Membership has approved six OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard extensions as official OGC standards. These WCS extensions significantly expand the ability of researchers, environmental managers, disaster managers, policy advisers and others to access the world's network-distributed Earth imaging data resources.

The OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard defines an interface for requesting coverage data, such as sensor data, satellite imagery, image time series, point clouds, and TINs (triangulated irregular networks). The six new WCS Extensions specify standard mechanisms for providing additional control over the processing of a coverage during its server-side processing:

• GML Application Schema - Coverages - GeoTIFF Coverage Encoding Profile: Returns a coverage in GeoTIFF encoding, in addition to formats like the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard.

• WCS Range Subsetting Extension: Specifies a standard way to extract specific fields from the range set of a coverage as part of the data request. For example, in remote sensing this is known as “band” or “channel” subsetting and in climate modeling it is called “variable extraction”.

• WCS Scaling Extension: Specifies parameters to a request to provide control over scaling of a coverage during its server-side processing.

• WCS Interpolation Extension: Enables clients to specify the interpolation method that the server shall apply to a coverage.

• WCS Processing Extension: Specifies the standard service interface to the Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) query language. WCPS extends WCS functionality with a high-level query language for server-side filtering and processing of multi-dimensional Big Data.

• WCS Earth Observation Profile: Defines a profile of WCS 2.0 for use on Earth Observation data."

And another OGC press release of interest:

The OGC adopts Open Modelling Interface (OpenMI) Standard

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1 July 2014 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) membership has approved the Open Modelling Interface Standard Version 2 (OpenMI) as an OGC standard. This standard defines a means by which independently developed computer models of environmental processes, or indeed any processes, can exchange data as they run and hence facilitates the modelling of interacting processes.

The original driver for the OpenMI was the European Water Framework Directive and the requirement for an integrated approach to water management. It was foreseen that implementing the Directive would be very challenging and that there would be a need to provide help, in the form of decision support systems (DSS), to environmental managers. As Earth systems are complex and interrelated, these DSS would need to bring together many models in order to better understand and predict the environmental impacts of events and policies. To make it feasible to link together models of different processes from different suppliers and hence simulate process interaction, the European Commission therefore co-funded the research and development of a generic model interface, the outcome of which is the OpenMI.

Roger Moore, chairman of the OpenMI Association, said, "The OpenMI Association sees huge opportunities ahead for many stakeholder groups if the linking of models of different processes as they run can be made simple and reliable. Our immediate goal is to facilitate the integrated modelling needed to understand Earth system processes and hence help scientists, policy makers and managers find sustainable solutions to environmental challenges. By publishing the OpenMI as an adopted OGC standard, we seek to make the OpenMI standard available and accessible to the worldwide modelling community."

Environmental modelling is not the only application of integrated modelling. For example, a possible shorter term application will simply be in enabling developers to convert their existing large, and often unmanageable applications, into sets of linkable components. This could change the modelling market from one for complete systems into one for components and services. It could make it much easier for products to be brought to market, widen participation and dramatically drive up the rate of innovation.

The standard can be viewed and downloaded at www.opengeospatial.org/standards/openmi. More information is available on the OpenMI website at www.openmi.org.

"Progress toward a sustainable future depends on our improved understanding of Earth systems and our collective ability to act from the local to global levels," said Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of the OGC. "This partnership with OpenMI enables our organizations to work more closely to assure that open standards-based modelling capabilities can be seamlessly and rapidly integrated into processing environments."

The OpenMI Association is an entirely open not-for-profit international group of organizations and people dedicated to taking the OpenMI (Open Modelling Interface) forward into the future. Its primary objectives are to develop, maintain and promote the OpenMI and integrated modelling. Learn more about the OpenMI Association at www.openmi.org.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 475 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, sensors 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 at www.opengeospatial.org/contact.