Special capabilities are offered by some data sources to provide additional functionality, such as TimeSeriesBrowse.

- TimeSeriesBrowse is where the data source can construct URIs to read any time span.
- Caching is used when it's convenient for data sources to read in several data sets at once, and clients should query to see if other datasets have been loaded already.
- Updating allows the data source to ask clients to come back and ask for a new version of the data sets.