[MetaCRS] question on GeoTiff axis order

[Norm Olsen]

Hello All . . .

I'm on board with Frank on this one.  We certainly could go and redo all this to be the "correct way"; but at the cost of many man years of effort for virtually no benefit at all.  The end result after experiencing many years of agony and pain would be pretty much what we have now as technology advancement would have to take a big hit to provide the resources to achieve "axis order correctness".

Virtually every GIS/CAD/CAM system expects the first ordinate of a coordinate array to increase to the east, and the second ordinate to increase to the north, and the third ordinate (if present) to increase away from the center of the earth.

While it is nice to be "correct", the price of "correcting" 30 years of software development makes this idea unthinkable.

Norm Olsen


-----Original Message-----
From: metacrs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:metacrs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Martin Desruisseaux
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 10:33 AM
To: metacrs at lists.osgeo.org; geotiff at lists.maptools.org
Subject: Re: [MetaCRS] question on GeoTiff axis order

Le 17/12/10 18:15, Frank Warmerdam a écrit :
> My approach is to assume long/lat for geographic coordinate systems, but
> (in theory at least) to honour EPSG axis order for projected coordinate
> systems.

This rule sound a nice compromise to me: unambiguous while simple, and probably 
matching a majority of common practices :). Thanks for the clarification.


> I'm cc:ing the geotiff list since that is really where this discussion
> should be.

The http://www.remotesensing.org/geotiff/faq.html#Status FAQ entry gave us the 
feeling that the GeoTIFF mailing list was not active anymore, but I think that 
we have misunderstood this FAQ entry.

	Martin
_______________________________________________
MetaCRS mailing list
MetaCRS at lists.osgeo.org
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/metacrs