1. Point Clouds as Coverages
95th OGC Technical Committee
Boulder, Colorado USA
Peter Baumann
1 June 2015
Copyright © 2015 Open Geospatial Consortium

2. Rectified GridCoverage
The Coverage Family
Spatio-temporal, n-D
Any suitable format
Interoperable, testable
Can be served by many WxS etc
«FeatureType»
Abstract Coverage
Grid Coverage
MultiSolid Coverage
Rectified GridCoverage
MultiSurface Coverage
Referenceable GridCoverage
MultiCurve Coverage
MultiPoint Coverage

3. Point Clouds in the Coverage Family Rectified GridCoverage
Spatio-temporal, n-D
Any suitable format
Interoperable, testable
Can be served by many WxS etc
«FeatureType»
Abstract Coverage
Grid Coverage
MultiSolid Coverage
Rectified GridCoverage
MultiSurface Coverage
Referenceable GridCoverage
MultiCurve Coverage
MultiPoint Coverage

4. Point Clouds: Service Functionality in WCS
WCS Core: access to n-D coverages & subsets
format encoding on the fly
subset = trim | slice
WCS Extensions: optional functionality facets
Future: Clustering, thinning, etc on Point Clouds?
WCS Application Profiles: domain-oriented bundling of extensions
EO, MetOcean, (Sensors), ... PointClouds?
Large, growing implementation basis:
rasdaman, GDAL, QGIS, OpenLayers, OPeNDAP, MapServer, GeoServer, NASA WorldWind, EOx-Server; Pyxis, ERDAS, ArcGIS, ...

5. Extensible Support by Coverages
Point Cloud data: uniform embedding in one of OGC’s base structures
high-level
uniform handling of space + time
format independent
Point Cloud services: function-rich, mature service framework
Harmonized with relevant other OGC standards