[MetaCRS] libgeotiff as part of metacrs

[Richard Greenwood]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 1:28 PM, Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam at pobox.com> wrote:
> 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.

As an interested observer, I think that it is appropriate and logical
that geotiff/libgeotiff become members of the  MetaCRS project.

-- 
Richard Greenwood
richard.greenwood at gmail.com
www.greenwoodmap.com