[MetaCRS] libgeotiff as part of metacrs

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

I'd like to have the geotiff and libgeotiff effort join the MetaCRS project.

   http://geotiff.maptools.org/
   http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/MetaCRS

Libgeotiff is a library and supporting data files for implementing the
geotiff specification which adds coordinate system support to the TIFF format.

The specification is fairly closely tied to the EPSG coding system.

GeoTIFF was originally developed by an adhoc group of folks from industry,
and government lead primarily by Niles Ritter (USGS) and Mike Ruth (Spot)
but they have both moved on to other things, and I have been acting as
maintainer for the code for roughly 10 years.

There has been no formal mechanism available to update the specification.

For the libgeotiff effort, I dump the EPSG database as .csv files, and
produced denormalized pcs and gcs definition files.  These .csv files are
in turn used by the GDAL project (the OGRSpatialReference class) to translate
EPSG definitions into other formats, for instance for the use of the postgis,
and PROJ.4 projects.

The geotiff project has also been the home to my adhoc pages describing
how to translate projections between a few common formats:

   http://geotiff.maptools.org/proj_list

My primary reasoning for wanting geotiff/libgeotiff under the care of the
MetaCRS group is that libgeotiff is primary about CRS management, it is too
small a project to join OSGeo on it's own, and it's EPSG handling is
foundational for dictionary files used by the GDAL, QGIS, PROJ and PostGIS
projects.

This email seeks feedback on the idea.  Barring strong negative feedback
I'll bring a motion to the MetaCRS PSC in the near future.  Once adopted,
it would be my intention to move libgeotiff into the MetaCRS SVN and to
setup a Trac instance to be the new libgeotiff and geotiff home.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org