deegree Web Coverage Service (WCS) is an Open Source implementation of the OpenGIS® Web Coverage Service (WCS) Implementation Standard. WCS defines a standardized interface and standardized operations to access geospatial coverages. A coverage (according to the OpenGIS® Abstract Specification Topic 6: Schema for coverage geometry and functions) is a feature that associates positions within a bounded space to feature attribute values (range). A coverage does not necessarily have to be a raster data set, but most of deegree users utilize the deegree WCS to provide uniform access to raster data like topographic maps and remote sensing data (like aerial imagery). Other fields of application include provision of digital elevation models (DEM) or groundwater surface data.

deegree WCS currently implements WCS versions 1.1.0 and 1.0.0 and has been chosen as the Open Geospatial Consortiums (OGC) reference implementation for WCS 1.0.0.

deegree WCS provides fast access to even huge amounts of coverage data (e.g. state-wide satellite image databases) through an indexed file storage mechnisms. Besides the service implementation, deegree WCS provides command-line-tools to build index-files, index-databases and a pyramidal datastructure as raster tree. It supports nearest neighbor, bicubic and bilinear interpolation methods for resampling.

deegree WCS is certified to be OGC compliant and offers standardized access to coverage data. In conjunction with deegree WMS, which can use deegree WCS as local or remote datasource, you can add coverage data to your spatial data infrastructure. deegree WMS provides the visualization while deegree WCS provides access to coverage data from various datasources including TIFF, JPG, GIF, PNG, GeoTIFF, etc.