On the systematic generation of reference output for geo image services

Geospatial Raster Services provide access to manifold and large assets of geo information in earth system sciences, such as solar, atmosphere, cryosphere, oceans, solid earth, and biosphere research. Conformance testing of such services increases confidence in credibility of their results, something essential for collaborative science. In this paper we propose to test geo services against reference output generated along the Douglas oracle taxonomy. Test oracles, which generate reference output for comparison against actual responses of the system under test, can be grouped, thereby enabling automatic generation of such tests based on suitably expressed interface specifications. This work is part of the ongoing development of a conformance test suite for the OGC WCS 2.0 standard.