[OSGeo-Announce] Open Letter for the need for Open Standards in LiDAR

[Jorge Sanz]

To all colleagues in Academia, Government and Industry who have
interest in maintaining Open Standards:

On behalf of '''Geo for All''' community[1], I would like to bring to
your kind attention a significant development that can lead to
undermining our principle for Open Geospatial Standards. I request you
review the wikipage[2] that is meant to represent our concern and
allow for ongoing input and expression by our geospatial community.

We specifically thank Martin Isenburg (author of LASzip[3] and
LAStools[4] for bringing this matter to our attentionand an email
thread of our initial discussion[5] of this subject that highlight the
wider implication of this issue.

We request all who wish to support this effort to protect Open
Standards for Geospatial data to kindly add your name, email,
affiliation details to the wikipage directly or email Patrick Hogan
with the subject heading ''Support for Open Geo Standards'' and the
following fields (Name, Email, Affiliation) and we will gladly add
this to the wiki.

There is current interest by the OGC in pursuing point cloud encoding
standards, including a member-initiated mechanism to extend LAS data
with OGC-standard XML content. The OGC invites interested members who
wish to work on this effort to please contact Scott Simmons (Executive
Director, Standards[7]) to register their interest and discuss
details.OGC will also be holding an ad hoc session at our next
Technical Committee meeting in Boulder, CO, USA in June 1st (more
details will be send soon) to bring together all interested from all
sectors (government, industry, academia) for this and plan next steps.
We welcome feedback and input from Esri and invite them to join this
effort tosupport open LIDAR formats.

I thank you all again for your attention and support for this important matter.

Best wishes,

Suchith Anand
Founder, GeoForAll
http://www.geoforall.org


[1] http://www.geoforall.org
[2] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/LIDAR_Format_Letter
[3] http://laszip.org
[4] http://lastools.org
[5] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/ica-osgeo-labs/2015-March/001225.html
[6] patrick.hogan at nasa.gov
[7] ssimmons at opengeospatial.org

-- 
Jorge Sanz
http://www.osgeo.org
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Jorge_Sanz
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