rasdaman newsletter 06/2025
GEO Global Forum Discussing Standards Progress
Rome, May 2025 -- The Group on Earth Observations (GEO) this year held its 20th Forum in Rome. At the large booth of the European Commission, the substantial European contributions to standardization were presented, in particular in the field of datacubes.
GEO is a global alliance dedicated to understanding Earth's complexities. As an intergovernmental body, GEO co-produces user-driven Earth Intelligence solutions. The GEO Global Forum 2025 was a unique moment to celebrate 20 years of GEO’s activities and to engage with the international Environmental Observation (EO) community. The EU booth offered an immersion in the EU funded activities and datacube standardization, presented by the main standards developer, Peter Baumann.
Based on his more than two decades of active standardization work, Baumann presented an overview of datacube standardization activities in OGC, ISO, and INSPIRE. "The good news is that the standards across these bodies are harmonized", he shares. The "coverage" concept provides the stable, mature, and practice-proven fundament for modeling of data and services. For example, the OGC Coverage Implementation Schema (CIS) and ISO 19123-2 are maintained and advanced simultaneously, with a current effort currently converging: A new version of 19123-2 will integrate OGC CIS 1.0 and 1.1 and also align with the terminology of ISO 19123-1. The result is expected to get adopted by OGC again, thereby keeping the standards in sync as in the past.
On the services side, ISO 19123-3 establishes a high-level datacube processing concept based on OGC WCPS, a Petabyte-proven geo datacube query language.
Baumann also pointed out further standardization work in progress. OAPI-Coverages is work in progress since about seven years now, with no voting date on the horizon yet. Technically, OAPI-Coverages mostly copies WCS functionality into a new protocol syntax, with some deviations introduced; however, the specification still is in flux. In the new OGC GeoDataCube Working Group even two divergent approaches are developed in parallel, likewise still under discussion. So none of these are standards now and in the near future.
A comparison of the services and their different protocols is possible with the pioneer rasdaman datacube engine which implements both WCS and WCPS (as official OGC Reference Implementation) and OAPI-Coverages.
In conclusion, datacubes are supported by a mature, harmonized set of standards, consisting of the CIS data standard paired with the WCS and WCPS service standards. Support through European funding in the course of Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe was instrumental for the development and reference implementation of these meantime widely adopted standards.
EGU 2025 made it clear that datacube analytics are no longer a fringe interest. They are becoming essential tools for scientists grappling with the scale and speed of 21st-century earth system dynamics. The session on “What Really Works” was aptly named—not a Powerpoint circus, but a demonstration of tools and systems ready for today’s challenges and tomorrow’s ambitions.
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