Abstract
The geospatial community has invested significant resources in defining and developing Geospatial Data Cubes (GDCs), demonstrating a commitment to creating an infrastructure that enables the organized storage and use of multidimensional geospatial data. While progress has been made, the state of the art falls short of fully interoperable GDCs capable of meeting specific organizational requirements. Establishing reference implementations to ensure GDCs are both interoperable and exploitable—particularly in Earth Observation (EO) contexts—remains a priority.
Based on the collective efforts of the OGC Testbed-19 GDC Activity and the GeoDataCube Standards Working Group (SWG), the definition of the draft OGC API — GeoDataCube Standard strives to unify the disparate threads of geospatial data cube technology. By integrating elements from the openEO API, OGC API — Processes, and the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC), the GDC draft API presents a holistic approach to accessing, managing, and processing Earth Observation data.
A GeoDataCube API combines data access and analysis functionality. A GDC API implementation would support access to datasets in the form of data cubes with the basic capabilities of filtering, subsetting, and aggregating. Further advanced processing is enabled through the integration of existing processing API endpoints (e.g., OGC API – Processes Standard and the openEO API Specification).
This Testbed 20 Report focuses on profiling existing capabilities defined by other OGC-approved and draft standards, such as the OGC API — Processes Standard and OGC API — Coverages Standard, as well as community-driven standards such as the openEO API.