[Liblas-devel] the proposed LAS 1.4 specification is broken (an open letter to the ASPRS LAS committee)

[Martin Isenburg]

Hello,

The current proposal for the new LAS 1.4 specification breaks away in
compatibility from the LAS 1.0 – LAS 1.3 family. In an open letter [1] I
explain why this is a terrible idea. I also show how easy it would be to fix
the current proposal. So far the ASPRS committee has ignored these concerns
that are shared among a number of reputed LAS developers. What can you do?
Contact the ASPRS LAS committee [2,3], ask for a copy of the proposed
specification, and join a discussion [4] in an open forum (maybe not on this
list (-:).

[1]
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/lastools/download/open_letter_broken_LAS_1_4_specification.pdf
[2]
http://www.asprs.org/a/society/committees/standards/lidar_exchange_format.html
[3] http://groups.google.com/group/ASPRS-LAS/members
[4] https://lidarbb.cr.usgs.gov/index.php?showtopic=13592

Some more detail: The proposed LAS 1.4 specification is not backwards
compatible and also breaks the forward compatibility of the LAS 1.X family
that, for example, had allowed a LAS 1.1 reader to read a LAS 1.3 file that
contains only points of type 0 or 1. Furthermore, it - for the first time -
will require a LAS programmers to implement at least two different LAS
specifications if they want their software to read and write LAS content
other than LAS 1.4.

Fixing this broken LAS 1.4 specification requires nothing more than to
rearrange a few count and offset fields in the LAS header as detailed in the
open letter [1].

Regards,

Martin @lastools
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