Abstract/Summary

Many kinds of scientific data, including satellite imagery, climate simulations and sensor data, can be represented as coverages, which are essentially mappings from points in space and time to data values. Coverage data are typically encoded as multidimensional arrays in com- pact binary forms such as NetCDF, HDF and GeoTIFF, most of which require specialist knowledge and tools to process and manipulate. There is considerable current interest in helping the wider Web community use coverage data, by providing data in more general formats such as JSON and RDF, and by using commonly-accepted vocabularies. This short discussion paper outlines some current work in the area and highlights some of the main inherent issues.