[Qgis-developer] WCS

[Radim Blazek]

Thanks to financial support from T4E s.r.l http://www.t4e.it/
I could implement WCS support based on GDAL WCS driver.

It is available here: https://github.com/blazek/Quantum-GIS branch wcs

Because of WCS 1.1 bugs in GDAL (wrong axis order in bbox for latlong,
no way to specify response CRS) and Mapserver (ignores  RangeSubset)
we have to stick with WCS 1.0 but capabilities parser for 1.1 is
ready.

It was written with possible use of common base classes for W*S in
mind: new classes QgsOWSConnection, QgsOWSSourceSelect.

Open issues:
- How to pass the raster to GDAL Tools. Currently the XML string is
created on the fly by GDAL provider and passed as a string to
GDALOpen, there is no XML file which could be given to GDAL Tools.
- How to specify an extent and resolution in GDAL Tools.
- How to implement save a copy of WCS part

Related:
I believe that it could be better to organize OWS by servers instead
of by services, especially in the browser. Instead of adding a new
connection for each service, user could add just one generic OWS
connection and available services would appear under that connection
in the tree. I have implemented this in OWS meta provider. It reads
and combines all defined WMS, WFS and WCS connections and displays all
available layers (if there are few) or  services under the connection:
https://picasaweb.google.com/radim.blazek/OWS

Radim