Coverage Standards and Services, Geographic

Definition

A geographic coverage is a representation of a phenomenon or phenomena within a bounded spatiotemporal region by assigning a value or a set of values to each position within the spatiotemporal domain. Geographic coverage standards specify schema and frameworks for geographic coverage or coverage components. Geographic coverage services are those having standard interfaces defined by widely recognized standardization bodies.

Main Text

Geographic phenomena can be observed in two forms, one is discrete and the other is continuous. Discrete phenomena are usually objects that can be directly recognized due to the existence of their geometrical boundaries with other objects. Continuous phenomena usually do not have observable boundaries and vary continuously over space.

The information on the discrete phenomena and that on continuous phenomenon are often used differently and operations performed on the data recording of these two categories of information are usually also...