[OSGeo-Standards] 2017, 2018 Q1+Q2 REPORT: my OGC membership slot

[Martin Isenburg]

Hello,

I have used my OGC membership slot to (remote-) attend a number of meetings
of the Point Cloud Domain Working Group, with the most recent being the one
in Ft. Collins. The main reason that I have this slot was to be able to
participate in discussions to assure that the compression of point cloud
data does not lead to a fragmentation into open formats (aka LAZ) and
proprietary clones (aka zLAS).

The repeated "stigmatization" of the proprietary compressed point cloud by
ESRI seems to have been successful. For example, the federal guideline of
the Canadian government for LiDAR acquisitions that was published in 2017
forbids delivery in a non-open format and explicitly names LAS and LAZ as
the desired uncompressed and compressed point cloud deliverables:

http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2017/rncan-nrcan/M113-1-117-eng.pdf

Furthermore the USGS has recently announced to move their entire LiDAR
holdings by September 2018 to the compressed LAZ format and use this for
all future LiDAR distributions:

http://www.usgs.gov/news/3d-elevation-program-distributing-lidar-data-laz-format

In the meantime (and so far without big announcements) the native extension
of LASzip to the newer point types of LAS 1.4 has been completed, was
crowd-tested and integrated into a number of software packages.

The other big development in terms of the ASPRS  LAS point cloud format was
that over the course of 2017 the OGC has voted, approved, and in March 2018
published the ASPRS  LAS 1.4 specification (without compression) as an OGC
Community Standard.

https://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/17-030r1

There were also some big changes within the LAS Working Group (LWG) of the
ASRPS  that continues to maintain the (uncompressed) LAS format. The group
is now chaired by Evon Silvia who - with a lot of help from Howard Butler -
implemented a completely new way of continuing forward. The specification
document that used to be a back-and-forth-emailed "Master Word document" is
now maintained on github where anyone can keep track of the changes that
are being made and follow the on-going discussions:

https://github.com/ASPRSorg/LAS

I plan to use my OGC slot to continue attending the meetings and update the
Point Cloud Domain Working Group on the new features available in LASzip
for LAS 1.4 such as selective decompression (only decompress those point
attributes that are of interest) and variable chunking (vary the number of
points that are compressed and decompressed as one independent "chunk" for
better alignment with other needs like spatial search structure). I am
happy that my OGC slot was extended for another year.

Regards,

Martin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/standards/attachments/20180713/1e2446a1/attachment.html>