Quick Rundown
According to trusty Wikipedia (et al), WCS stands for Web Coverage Service, and is "digital geospatial information representing space/time-varying phenomena." Makes so much sense, right? Yeah, not really. So, I did some digging around, and found the following bits of useful info. Hope these help!
A Fancy Flowchart and an Explanation
From what I can tell, WCS is used to georeference aerial photographs, scanned maps, and other raster images in GIS. The WCS server we use is part of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC Server) Web Coverage Service (WGS), and acts an an interface to apply geographic location data to pictures. It is related to OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) (see: how-to-wfs) and the Web Map Service (WMS).The flowchart below is probably more confusing than helpful, but take a look:
Some Helpful Links
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Coverage_Service
- http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wcs
- http://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/services/wcs/index.html <—A more intuitive resource than the rest.