National foreword

This British Standard is the UK implementation of EN ISO 19123‑3:2023. It is identical to ISO 19123‑3:2023.

The UK participation in its preparation was entrusted to Technical Committee IST/36, Geographic information.

A list of organizations represented on this committee can be obtained on request to its committee manager.

Contractual and legal considerations

This publication has been prepared in good faith, however no representation, warranty, assurance or undertaking (express or implied) is or will be made, and no responsibility or liability is or will be accepted by BSI in relation to the adequacy, accuracy, completeness or reasonableness of this publication. All and any such responsibility and liability is expressly disclaimed to the full extent permitted by the law.

This publication is provided as is, and is to be used at the recipient’s own risk.

The recipient is advised to consider seeking professional guidance with respect to its use of this publication.

This publication is not intended to constitute a contract. Users are responsible for its correct application.

Compliance with a British Standard cannot confer immunity from legal obligations.

This British Standard was published under the authority of the Standards Policy and Strategy Committee on 31 July 2023.

This European Standard was approved by CEN on 20 May 2023.

This European Standard was corrected and reissued by the CEN-CENELEC Management Centre on 15 November 2023.

CEN members are bound to comply with the CEN/CENELEC Internal Regulations which stipulate the conditions for giving this European Standard the status of a national standard without any alteration. Up-to-date lists and bibliographical references concerning such national standards may be obtained on application to the CEN-CENELEC Management Centre or to any CEN member.

This European Standard exists in three official versions (English, French, German). A version in any other language made by translation under the responsibility of a CEN member into its own language and notified to the CEN-CENELEC Management Centre has the same status as the official versions.

CEN members are the national standards bodies of Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Republic of North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Türkiye and United Kingdom.

European foreword

This document (EN ISO 19123‑3:2023) has been prepared by Technical Committee ISO/TC 211 "Geographic information/Geomatics" in collaboration with Technical Committee CEN/TC 287 “Geographic Information” the secretariat of which is held by BSI.

This European Standard shall be given the status of a national standard, either by publication of an identical text or by endorsement, at the latest by January 2024, and conflicting national standards shall be withdrawn at the latest by January 2024.

Attention is drawn to the possibility that some of the elements of this document may be the subject of patent rights. CEN shall not be held responsible for identifying any or all such patent rights.

Any feedback and questions on this document should be directed to the users’ national standards body/national committee. A complete listing of these bodies can be found on the CEN website.

According to the CEN-CENELEC Internal Regulations, the national standards organizations of the following countries are bound to implement this European Standard:Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Republic of North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Türkiye and the United Kingdom.

Endorsement notice

The text of ISO 19123‑3:2023, Corrected version 2023-11 has been approved by CEN as EN ISO 19123‑3:2023 without any modification.

Foreword

ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies (ISO member bodies). The work of preparing International Standards is normally carried out through ISO technical committees. Each member body interested in a subject for which a technical committee has been established has the right to be represented on that committee. International organizations, governmental and non-governmental, in liaison with ISO, also take part in the work. ISO collaborates closely with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) on all matters of electrotechnical standardization.

The procedures used to develop this document and those intended for its further maintenance are described in the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 1. In particular, the different approval criteria needed for the different types of ISO document should be noted. This document was drafted in accordance with the editorial rules of the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2 (see www.iso.org/directives).

ISO draws attention to the possibility that the implementation of this document may involve the use of (a) patent(s). ISO takes no position concerning the evidence, validity or applicability of any claimed patent rights in respect thereof. As of the date of publication of this document, ISO had not received notice of (a) patent(s) which may be required to implement this document. However, implementers are cautioned that this may not represent the latest information, which may be obtained from the patent database available at www.iso.org/patents. ISO shall not be held responsible for identifying any or all such patent rights.

Any trade name used in this document is information given for the convenience of users and does not constitute an endorsement.

For an explanation of the voluntary nature of standards, the meaning of ISO specific terms and expressions related to conformity assessment, as well as information about ISO's adherence to the World Trade Organization (WTO) principles in the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT), see www.iso.org/iso/foreword.html.

This document was prepared by Technical Committee ISO/TC 211, Geographic information/Geomatics, in collaboration with the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) Technical Committee CEN/TC 287, Geographic Information, in accordance with the Agreement on technical cooperation between ISO and CEN (Vienna Agreement), in collaboration with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), and in collaboration with the IEEE GRSS Earth Science Informatics Technical Committee.

This corrected version of ISO 19123‑3:2023 incorporates the following correction:

“FDIS” removed from headers throughout the document.

A list of all parts in the ISO 19123 series can be found on the ISO website.

Any feedback or questions on this document should be directed to the user’s national standards body. A complete listing of these bodies can be found at www.iso.org/members.html.

Introduction

This document defines, at a high level, implementation-independent operations on coverages, i.e. digital representations of space-time varying geographic phenomena, as defined in ISO 19123‑1. Specifically, regular and irregular grid coverages are addressed. The operations can be applied through an expression language allowing composition of unlimited complexity and combining an unlimited number of coverages for data fusion.

The language is functionally defined and free of any side effects. Its conceptual foundation relies on only two constructs: A “coverage constructor” builds a coverage, either from scratch or by deriving it from one or more other coverages. A “coverage condenser” derives summary information from a coverage by performing an aggregation such as count, sum, minimum, maximum and average.

The coverage processing language is independent from any request and response encoding, as no concrete request/response protocol is assumed. Hence, this document does not define a concrete service, but acts as the foundation for defining service standards functionality. One such standardization target is the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS).^[3]

Throughout this document, the following formatting conventions apply.

Bold-Face in the text, such as processCoveragesExpr, represents syntax elements, normatively defined in Annex B.
Text in italics, such as succ(), represents mathematical functions and variables.
Courier font, such as return and encode(), is used for code in the sense of the coverage processing language.

1 Scope

This document defines a coverage processing language for server-side extraction, filtering, processing, analytics, and fusion of multi-dimensional geospatial coverages representing, for example, spatio-temporal sensor, image, simulation, or statistics datacubes. Services implementing this language provide access to original or derived sets of coverage information, in forms that are useful for client-side consumption.

This document relies on the ISO 19123‑1 abstract coverage model. In this edition, regular and irregular multi-dimensional grids are supported for axes that can carry spatial, temporal or any other semantics. Future editions will additionally support further axis types as well as further coverage types from ISO 19123‑1, specifically, point clouds and meshes.

2 Normative references

3 Terms and definitions

4 Conformance

4.1 Notation

4.2 Interoperability and conformance testing

4.3 Organization

5 Coverage model

5.1 Overview

5.2 Coverage model

5.3 Coverage identifier

5.4 Domain

5.5 Interpolation

5.6 Range values

5.7 Range type

5.8 Coverage probing functions synopsis

6 Coverage processing language

6.1 Syntax and Semantics Definition Style

6.2 Coverage Processing Expressions

6.3 Coverage-Generating Expressions

6.4 Coverage Extraction Expressions

6.5 Coverage range value-changing expressions

6.6 Coverage Derivation Expressions

6.7 Coverage Aggregation Expressions

6.8 Coverage Encode/Decode Expressions

6.9 Expression evaluation

6.10 Evaluation response

Bibliography

BS EN ISO 19123-3:2023

Geographic information — Schema for coverage geometry and functions - Processing fundamentals

Current

Published:

31 Jul 2025