Coverage Data - Coverage Encoding

Coverage Encoding

As coverages are conceptually concisely defined through GML, a natural representation is GML itself (such as for sensor time series). However, this is not mandatory: any of a series of data formats can be used to encode a coverage, such as GeoTIFF, NetCDF, HDF-EOS, or NITF.

As some of these encoding formats are not capable of incorporating all metadata making up a coverage, GMLCOV foresees a multipart MIME encoding (see Figure) where the first component encodes the coverage description (domain extent, range type, metadata, etc.) and the second part consists of the range set "payload" using some encoding format.