<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
Michael,<br>
Are there any spare OGC slots?<br>
If so, I'd be keen to use this OGC slot to join Martin's
presentation.<br>
My use of the OGC/OSGeo membership need only be for this coming
week.<br>
<br>
Warm regards, Cameron<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 27/11/2015 12:08 am, Michael P.
Gerlek wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:072D1F91-8699-4F84-8161-BAF0A289C083@flaxen.com"
type="cite">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<div>Martin-</div>
<div id="AppleMailSignature"><br>
</div>
<div id="AppleMailSignature">You have one of the osgeo memberships
(expires 2016-01-08), so no problem on that. Good luck!</div>
<div id="AppleMailSignature"><br>
.mpg</div>
<div><br>
On Nov 26, 2015, at 7:23 AM, Martin Isenburg <<a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:martin.isenburg@gmail.com"><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:martin.isenburg@gmail.com">martin.isenburg@gmail.com</a></a>>
wrote:<br>
<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div>
<div dir="ltr">Hello,
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I would like to use the "free (waived) meeting
registrations for up to 1 person per Technical Committee
Meeting" that OSGeo receives as part of their OGC
membership package to attend the nect OGC TC in Sydney and
present at the Point Cloud Domain Working Group meeting on
Thursday (03 December) at 10:45 am (local Sydney time). </div>
<div> </div>
<div>I plan to introduce the current design choices of the
existing open source LASzip LiDAR compressor for LAS 1.0
to LAS 1.4 (compatibility) and an outlook on what is
currently planned for LAS 1.4 (native) <br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>The deadline for registration is tomorrow (27th) and it
seems that free (waived) meeting registrations to the TC
that OSGeo receives is still up for grabs. May I use it?
If I do not hear anyone protesting within the next 24
hours I will conclude that this slot is available for me.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Regards,</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Martin</div>
</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 6:31 PM,
Martin Isenburg <span dir="ltr"><<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:martin.isenburg@gmail.com"
target="_blank"><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:martin.isenburg@gmail.com">martin.isenburg@gmail.com</a></a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">Hello,
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I have used my OGC membership slot to
remote-attend the ad-hoc meeting on Point Clouds at
the OGC TC meeting in Boulder and give a
presentation on the 5 steps I consider necessary to
avoid the LiDAR point cloud fragmentation that the
OSGeo had warned about in their Open Letter [1].
Because the quality of my Internet connection was so
poor I re-recorded a version of my talk [2] and
submitted it as additional content for this weeks
OGC TC meeting in Nottingham where I became a
charter member of the newly formed Point Cloud
Domain Working Group [3]. Due to INTERGEO I was not
able to (remote-)attend this in person but I have
taken the time to listen through the entire 2:40
hour long video recording and gave comments to the
presentations that I send to the OGC PC-DWG today.
These are included at the end. I do plan to attend
the TC in Sydney in person.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Another curious thing is that I (and the open
source license LGPL) was attacked vehemently in a
recent column called "Open Source Mania" by Lewis
Graham that was published in the LiDAR News
magazine. Viewer discretion advised and parental
guidance suggested ... you will not like this FUD
attack:</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.lidarmag.com/PDF/LiDARNewsMagazine_Graham-OpenSourceMania_Vol5No4.pdf"
target="_blank">http://www.lidarmag.com/PDF/LiDARNewsMagazine_Graham-OpenSourceMania_Vol5No4.pdf</a><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Regards,</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Martin</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>[1] <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/LIDAR_Format_Letter"
target="_blank">http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/LIDAR_Format_Letter</a></div>
<div>[2] <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n52E6OM68UE"
target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n52E6OM68UE</a><br>
[3] <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.opengeospatial.org/point-cloud-dwg"
target="_blank">http://www.opengeospatial.org/point-cloud-dwg</a>
(older version)</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>-----</div>
to: <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:pointcloud.DWG@lists.opengeospatial.org"
target="_blank">pointcloud.DWG@lists.opengeospatial.org</a><br>
date: Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 6:01 PM<br>
subject: comments on Point Cloud DWG meeting at TC in
Nottingham
<div><br>
</div>
<div><span style="font-size:12.8px">Hello,</span><br
style="font-size:12.8px">
<br style="font-size:12.8px">
<span style="font-size:12.8px">Sorry that I was not
able to make it. The networks at INTERGEO were
overloaded and the show busy and loud. Remember,
the main objective of the OSGeo is to prevent the
"spread" of large quantities of "pseudo open"
point clouds in closed proprietary formats such as
RAR, MrSID, or zLAS using the 5 step plan outlined
here to prevent format fragmentation by LAZ and
zLAS:</span>
<div style="font-size:12.8px"><br>
</div>
<div style="font-size:12.8px"><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n52E6OM68UE"
style="font-size:12.8px" target="_blank"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n52E6OM68UE">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n52E6OM68UE</a></a><br>
</div>
<div style="font-size:12.8px"><br>
</div>
<div style="font-size:12.8px">We have already
"failed" the government of Slovenia that was
either tricked or misinformed about how to
implement "open data" and is currently
distributing their entire national LiDAR data set
in a closed point cloud format.<br>
<br>
I have just listened to the 2:40 hour long video
of the Point Cloud DWG meeting from the OGC TC in
Nottingham. Than you for providing it. Below my
comments on some presentations.</div>
<div style="font-size:12.8px">
<div><br>
1) "Serving_LiDAR_thru_existing_OGC_Services",
Scott Pakula, Pixia<br>
<br>
I agree that there are better ways to serve up
LiDAR than ftp links and if existing OGC
protocols can enhance the user exprience that is
great. But too much of this talk seemed to
advocate that we *need* a better user experience
and that sounds more like a business opportunity
based upon the distributed point data. I do not
require my government to provide me anything
more than a functional area-of-interest query to
access my tax-payer collected point data - even
if it as simple as some open layers shapefiles
pointing to a ftp site.</div>
<div>The download capability of the OpenTopography
portal alone, for example, is a great example
for a simple, useful, and widely popular LiDAR
portal. Everything beyond that can be done by
those that care about providing better user
experiences and those can be great business
models. But I do not see why the OGC needs to
have any say in one particular user experience
over another other than advocating all of them
to be based on open standards. Also ... for
future slides: It's capitalized LAStools and
LASzip ... (-:<br>
</div>
<div><br>
2) "The ASTM E57 File Format for 3D Imaging Data
Exchange", Gene Roe, Lidarnews<br>
<br>
E57 is a great standard and heavily used in
terrestrial LiDAR projects by many in this
industry. Adding compression to E57 is certainly
useful. But there are some inaccurate statements
on slide 4. PTS and PTX are ASCII formats and
thus - by definition - *not* proprietary. Better
examples would have been MrSID and zLAS. Here a
definition of what a proprietary format is:<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_format"
target="_blank"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_format">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_format</a></a></div>
<div>That LAZ is not listed on the "How Do People
Store 3D Data Today?" slide despite the fact
that pretty much all large LAS collection being
hosted as LAZ will not surprise anyone who
followed the "LAZ clone" controversy. Over the
past two years I have regularly lamented that
part of why ESRI seemed to get away with forcing
yet another proprietary format upon us was the
bias in the reporting of (sponsor-financed)
geospatial media outlets that was improperly
informing their readership. Gene had the most
notorius record of all in reporting every
incremental advance of the "LAZ clone" on
Lidarnews while ignoring the screaming
controversy. The inaccuracies on slide 4 suggest
that this bias continues, so I have little
choice but to advise taking his statements on
other formats with a grain of salt.</div>
<div>Another inaccuracy is the claim that LAS does
not allow extensions. I have been part of the
process of adding the "extra bytes" concept into
the LAS 1.4 specification that allows a
user-defined and documented addition of new
per-point attributes.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>That said, I really must complement Gene and
his colleagues on their amazing achievement with
E57. It is of great use to the industry as I
have just witnessed first hand at INTERGEO. But
I wish Gene could see the E57 format as a
complement (not a competition) to the LAS/LAZ
format for the (many) situations where the much
simpler LAS format is not sufficient - such as
storing multiple scans positions in a
terrestrial project or co-registered imagery.
<div><br>
</div>
<div>3) "OGC WCS: Format-independent Point Cloud
Services", Peter Baumann, Jacobs University</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Great presentation. Not much to add. Except
that the coordinate resolution in the GML
encoding on slide 4 makes me really worry.
Given their values those seem to be projected
xyz coordinates and writing them down with 15
digits after the decimal points (=> that is
the unit of femtometers [fm], a typical
length-scale of nuclear physics as the radius
of the gold nucleus is approximately 8.45 fm)
reminds me of this story:</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://rapidlasso.com/2015/09/02/england-releases-national-lidar-dem-with-insane-vertical-resolution/"
target="_blank">http://rapidlasso.com/2015/09/02/england-releases-national-lidar-dem-with-insane-vertical-resolution/</a><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>4) IQumulus, Jan Boehm, UCL</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Great presentation. Only comment. LASzip
will also compress any additional per-point
attributes stored to a LAS file. How well
depends on the resolution and how coherent the
attribute is stored. But compression will not
suffer as much as suggested.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>5) "Point Cloud
Photogrammetry", Jean-Baptiste Henry, Thales
Group</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Two small comments: (1) We can add
"confidence values" to ech point to LAS/LAZ
via the "Extra Bytes" functionality. (2) Do
not overestimate the "suitfulness" of the
ASPRS LAS Working Group (LWG) as a
standardization body to co-operate with. The
current LWG is a notoriously untransparent
groups with an unratified working protocol
written overnight that has no established
procedures such as record keeping / votings
process / regular meetings / or anything else
that are core to a normal standardization
body.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>6) "Management and direct use of massive
point clouds". Edward Verbree, TU Delft</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I agree that we need a point cloud *Web
service* that could potentially offer
multi-resolution access. This is a completely
orthogonal to the OSGeo request for
distributing point clouds only in *open*
formats. Such a service could either operate
from a data base but also a folder of point
clouds stored in either LAS / LAZ / E57 /PTS /
XYZ files (optionally at multiple resolutions)
or some other open point cloud format current
or future. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>There was a *wrong* statement at 2:20:25,
some mumbling about a"full commercial
package"? That was quite missleading. LASzip
is 100% and open source but TU Delft has in
addition decided to license rapidlasso's
LAStools software academically for some of the
more complex operations but the LAZ format has
absolutely no dependence on that.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="font-size:12.8px">Regards,</div>
<div style="font-size:12.8px"><br>
</div>
<div style="font-size:12.8px">Martin (to the best of
my knowledge and on behalf of OSGeo)</div>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
<br>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div><span>_______________________________________________</span><br>
<span>Standards mailing list</span><br>
<span><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:Standards@lists.osgeo.org">Standards@lists.osgeo.org</a></span><br>
<span><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/standards">http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/standards</a></span></div>
</blockquote>
<br>
<fieldset class="mimeAttachmentHeader"></fieldset>
<br>
<pre wrap="">_______________________________________________
Standards mailing list
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:Standards@lists.osgeo.org">Standards@lists.osgeo.org</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/standards">http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/standards</a></pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Cameron Shorter,
Software and Data Solutions Manager
LISAsoft
Suite 112, Jones Bay Wharf,
26 - 32 Pirrama Rd, Pyrmont NSW 2009
P +61 2 9009 5000, W <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.lisasoft.com">www.lisasoft.com</a>, F +61 2 9009 5099</pre>
</body>
</html>