WCS basics

GeoServer provides support for Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Coverage Service (WCS) versions 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0. One can think of WCS as the equivalent of Web Feature Service (WFS), but for raster data instead of vector data. It lets you get at the raw coverage information, not just the image. GeoServer is the reference implementation for WCS 1.1.