[Geotiff] BigTIFF Implementation Project - Seeking One Additional Sponsor

[Daniel Denk]

Frank,

Since you have direct contact with the Adobe developers. Can you comment on
whether Adobe intends to incorporate the BigTIFF import/export capability
into the Adobe family of products [ie: Photoshop]? I understand that CS3 is
in its beta development phase at this time.

Regards,
Daniel Denk




On 12/21/06, Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam at pobox.com> wrote:
>
> Folks,
>
> GeoTIFF has been one of the most successful geospatial imaging formats
> since
> it's inception over ten years ago as an extension to TIFF.
>
> However, the underlying TIFF format suffers from a size limit of 4GB.
> As time passes computing resources improve, and image data quantities
> balloon.  The 4GB limitations has become an increasing problem for our
> industry.
>
> In an effort to rectify this the TIFF user community on the TIFF mailing
> list developed a specification for an extension to TIFF to use 64bit
> offsets
> within a new variation of the format now referred to as BigTIFF.  This
> allows
> file sizes up to 18000 petabytes, effectively infinite.  This
> specification
> was developed with input from a variety of sources, including users of the
> libtiff library, representatives of Adobe (the owner of the TIFF
> specification)
> and developers of other TIFF codecs.
>
> The BigTIFF specification has been successfully implemented in one
> proprietary
> library from Aware Systems.  However, the libtiff development team has not
> been
> able to find the several months of development time required to implement
> support for BigTIFF in the libtiff library (used by libgeotiff, GDAL,
> MapServer, etc).
>
> Joris van Damme of Aware Systems (also a frequent contributor to libtiff
> and
> the TIFF mailing list) has agreed to implement a BigTIFF upgrade for
> libtiff
> if reasonable financial support can be found for the project.  To that
> end the "BigTIFF Sponsorship" effort was launched.  It is described at:
>
>   http://libtiff.maptools.org/BigTIFFProposal.html
>
> So far we have been quite successful and have secured commitments from
> three
> of four needed sponsors, each for an amount of $6000 USD towards the
> project.
> This email is a solicitation for one final sponsor for the same amount so
> that
> we can launch the development project in February.
>
> The proposal page above covers the details, but the gist is that the
> project
> will result in a libtiff 4.0 circa July 2007 that will support reading
> traditional TIFF files, as well as BigTIFF files, and will support writing
> either variant.  This capability will flow through to users of the GDAL
> library, MapServer and libgeotiff.
>
> This is an appeal from me then for one additional organization in our
> industry to step forward to support this important infrastructural
> project.
>
> In addition to the technical benefits this project will bring, I believe
> the project press release will also bring a reputational benefit to all
> the
> sponsors.
>
> Please contact myself or Joris van Damme if you are interested in taking
> the last sponsorship position so that we can launch the project on time.
>
> Best regards,
> --
>
> ---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
> I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam,
> warmerdam at pobox.com
> light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
> and watch the world go round - Rush    |
>
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>
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