Identify use cases for Coverages and possible alternative user workflows

[j08lue]

Support for Coverages (OGC WCS and/or OGC API Coverages) has been a requirement for this project, since it is one of the traditional OGC data access protocols.

However, since our consortium does not have a lot of hands-on experience with using Coverages from a client / end user perspective, we would like to make an effort to better understand and document the use cases we should support, so we can implement a useful service and validate it properly.

Related to

• Integration of OGC Coverages API Support [#2309] #21

Acceptance criteria

• Listed key use cases for Coverages from known EOEPCA+ stakeholder projects or other relevant projects

[j08lue]

In the EOEPCA Standards Roadmap, Coverages is mentioned as a data provider for processing and that it does not provide processing capabilities itself:

• No data processing API Coverages (like OGC WCPS was in the past)
• Coverages should provide the standard means to serve data cube inputs to processing, which can be OpenEO or OGC API processes.

As @jonas-eberle mentioned during the Testbed 20 presentation on GeoDataCube, cloud-optimized / access-optimized datasets in object storage eliminate, to some degree, the need for Coverages for optimized access, in particular for large multidimensional Zarr data cubes like DestinE provides.