A coverage is a set of homogeneous observations made on a partition or sampling of a spatio-temporal region OGC Topic 6 . Coverages are most commonly associated with imagery , where the spatial sampling is on a regular grid. Grids in one, two, and three spatial dimensions are common for various applications. Time-series are coverages in which one dimension is time. Most datasets used in statistical analysis are coverages.
Coverages are a very important type of geospatial data.
The data in a coverage may be represented simply as a collection of features , each of which has a location and its observation associated with it. However, coverages are often represented as a map , which is a term from mathematics used to describe a projection of values from a range function onto a sample space or domain set . Specifically, a coverage is a map in which the domain is embedded in geometric space. The map encoding is typically more efficient, since it can take advantage of the repetitive characteristics of the dataset. The domain set can be stored very compactly using iterators when the locations are on a grid.