[OSGeo-Standards] REPORT: my OGC membership slot

Thu Nov 26 10:48:10 PST 2015

Michael,
Are there any spare OGC slots?
If so, I'd be keen to use this OGC slot to join Martin's presentation.
My use of the OGC/OSGeo membership need only be for this coming week.

Warm regards, Cameron

On 27/11/2015 12:08 am, Michael P. Gerlek wrote:
> Martin-
>
> You have one of the osgeo memberships (expires 2016-01-08), so no 
> problem on that. Good luck!
>
> .mpg
>
> On Nov 26, 2015, at 7:23 AM, Martin Isenburg 
> <martin.isenburg at gmail.com <mailto:martin.isenburg at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> 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).
>> 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)
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Martin
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 6:31 PM, Martin Isenburg 
>> <martin.isenburg at gmail.com <mailto:martin.isenburg at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     Hello,
>>
>>     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.
>>
>>     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:
>>
>>     http://www.lidarmag.com/PDF/LiDARNewsMagazine_Graham-OpenSourceMania_Vol5No4.pdf
>>
>>     Regards,
>>
>>     Martin
>>
>>     [1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/LIDAR_Format_Letter
>>     [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n52E6OM68UE
>>     [3] http://www.opengeospatial.org/point-cloud-dwg (older version)
>>
>>     -----
>>     to: pointcloud.DWG at lists.opengeospatial.org
>>     <mailto:pointcloud.DWG at lists.opengeospatial.org>
>>     date:     Fri, Sep 18, 2015 at 6:01 PM
>>     subject: comments on Point Cloud DWG meeting at TC in Nottingham
>>
>>     Hello,
>>
>>     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:
>>
>>     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n52E6OM68UE
>>
>>     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.
>>
>>     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.
>>
>>     1) "Serving_LiDAR_thru_existing_OGC_Services", Scott Pakula, Pixia
>>
>>     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.
>>     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 ... (-:
>>
>>     2) "The ASTM E57 File Format for 3D Imaging Data Exchange", Gene
>>     Roe, Lidarnews
>>
>>     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:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_format
>>     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.
>>     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.
>>
>>     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.
>>
>>     3) "OGC WCS: Format-independent Point Cloud Services", Peter
>>     Baumann, Jacobs University
>>
>>     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:
>>
>>     http://rapidlasso.com/2015/09/02/england-releases-national-lidar-dem-with-insane-vertical-resolution/
>>
>>     4) IQumulus, Jan Boehm, UCL
>>
>>     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.
>>
>>     5) "Point Cloud Photogrammetry", Jean-Baptiste Henry, Thales Group
>>
>>     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.
>>
>>     6) "Management and direct use of massive point clouds". Edward
>>     Verbree, TU Delft
>>
>>     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.
>>
>>     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.
>>
>>     Regards,
>>
>>     Martin (to the best of my knowledge and on behalf of OSGeo)
>>
>>
>>
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