6 June 2014. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) seeks comments on the charter for a new GeoTIFF Standards Working Group (SWG). The charter is available at https://portal.ogc.org/files/57198. The OGC GeoTIFF SWG formation and process are being driven by the existing GeoTIFF user community.

The GeoTIFF format has been used for sharing coverage data successfully for years across many platforms and software environments. It is an important de facto standard used primarily for geolocated images. The current GeoTIFF specification was developed during the 1990's by a group of interested individuals and has served the community very well since then.

The purposes of this SWG are to:

  • Incorporate the GeoTIFF specification into the OGC standards suite by updating the specification to bring it into conformance with current OGC practices and 
  • Provide a forum for evolving the standard in the future, if need be.

The resulting candidate OGC standard will strive to maintain compatibility with existing GeoTIFF community implementations and practices and future evolution would be done in close cooperation with the existing GeoTIFF community.

The OGC GeoTIFF SWG will survey current GeoTIFF practice and address potential refinements to the specification available at http://trac.osgeo.org/geotiff/wiki/RefiningGeoTIFF. These efforts will form a basis for updating the current GeoTIFF Specification (available at http://trac.osgeo.org/geotiff/) to align it with OGC processes.

The initiators of the GeoTIFF SWG are the following OGC member representatives:

  • Ted Habermann, The HDF Group
  • Jeff Walter, NASA
  • Emmanuel Devys, DGIWG

The initiators encourage comments on the charter and participation in the OGC GeoTIFF Standards Working Group. Comments are due by 2014-07-06.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 475 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/. 

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