August 09, 2013 -- The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has started voting on adoption of the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Coordinate Reference System (CRS) Extension Standard.This is the final step following a successful 60-day public Request for Comment period. Right after voting started, several institutions and companies have already voted in favor of WCS CRS. Voting ends on August 19.

WCS defines an open standard interface to easily access multi-dimensional, spatio-temporal coverages, such as sensor data, satellite imagery, image time series, simulation data, point clouds, and meshes.

The OGC WCS CRS Extension defines an extension to the WCS Core that enables requests to specify that coverages be returned in one of a number of different Coordinate Reference Systems. While the WCS Core defines access only in the coverage’s Native CRS (i.e., the one in which the coverage is stored on the server), the WCS CRS Extension defines how to request and obtain a coverage in a CRS different from the Native CRS. This flexibility is important, for example, in exchanging data between different environments.

The OGC WCS CRS Extension is free and can be downloaded from the OGC Request for Comment page at  https://opengeospatial.org/standards/requests/100