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

[Bruce Bannerman]

Many thanks for your update Martin. Its good to see your continuing efforts.

I hope to be soon reading more updates from our other OGC membership holders.

Bruce


> On 14 Jul 2018, at 11:46, Cameron Shorter <cameron.shorter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Martin,
> 
> From your description, and also from having discussed these issues with you in the past, I feel that you have been providing exceptional value to the greater OSGeo community through your involvement in the OGC and the use of your OSGeo membership slot.
> 
> Thank you for all your hard work.
> 
> Warm regards, Cameron
> 
>> On 13/7/18 11:19 pm, Martin Isenburg wrote:
>> 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
>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
> -- 
> Cameron Shorter
> Technology Demystifier
> Open Technologies and Geospatial Consultant
> 
> M +61 (0) 419 142 254
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