The Earth Observer

--Colleen Hanley; Tel. 703/715-3137

Reston, VA -- On April 1 and 2, 1996, over 40 representatives from software, data, government and non-profit organizations convened at SPOT Image Corporation for the second annual conference on standardizing geographic raster data formats and applications. Participants included software vendors and developers such as ESRI, Intergraph, ERDAS, Bentley Systems, and E-Systems; data providers such as SPOT Image, SSC/Satellitbild, Space Imaging, OrbImage, Earth Watch, EOSAT, and Vargis; and government/non-profit organizations such as U.S. Geological Survey, Defense Mapping Agency, Open GIS, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and MITRE.

As a result of the SPOT/JPL-initiated effort, GeoTIFF 1.0 was endorsed as an industry standard for geographic raster data formats. Groups are also committed to developing the following elements:

• Support for very large (multi-gigabyte) image files through a "supertiling" structure
• Support for multiple projection spaces
• Increased capabilities of public domain software libraries
• Augmentation of the geodesy components to make more use of datum information
• Support for digital elevation models using the GeoTIFF image structure
• Recommendations for hyperspectral tiling protocols
• Deep (lossy) compression which preserves georeferencing properties upon decompression

An open forum discussion is currently taking place on the Internet with links from the SPOT Image home page. To obtain additional information, see "What's New" on http:

//www.spot.com (in the U.S.) or http://www.spotimage.fr (outside the U.S.).

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