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OSD Grants Phase I
Contract Award for GeoTIFF V2 Design
December
18, 1998 Today the Office of the Secretary
of Defense provide authorization for the Position Integrity Team to begin
design of GeoTIFF Version 2.0. GeoTIFF 2.0
is the next generation Geographic Information System (GIS) format for the
storage of multi-scale nested map datasets.
The GeoTIFF family of specifications is critical to real time
manipulation of maps, charts, photo-imagery, and terrain both in the battlefield
and in commercial navigation. The NASA
Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed GeoTIFF 1.0 in the early part of this
decade in coordination with scientists and cartographers from around the globe.
The contract is administered as an SBIR Phase I from the U.S. Special
Operations Command at MacDill AFB in Florida. Because the GeoTIFF architecture
and specification is open-format, non-proprietary, license-free and placed in the public domain, it became a popular
mechanism which all users and contributors could use to exchange geographic
data. It was rapidly adopted as a de-facto standard, with over 250 subscribing
organizations in 100 countries using GeoTIFF in mapping and cartography
applications. While GeoTIFF 1.0 was being used
extensively in scientific laboratories and in advanced industries like space
based imaging and oil exploration, it was difficult for the average pilot or
navigator to leverage the inherent advantages of this architecture. This is where we stepped in. The Position Integrity team partnered
with JPL on several Navy SBIR, Army
STTR and DARPA TRP Phase I, II and III contracts to incorporate the power of
GeoTIFF into a COTS Intel-based Windows-driven tactical mapping system. The result is the Position Integrity product
line. Its chief designer and architect,
Mr. Jesse Lund maintains the web site
for this robust and innovative software suite at: http://www.position-integrity.com Since this GeoTIFF 1.0-based moving
map and tactical display was introduced five years ago, Position Integrity has
been adopted by: 1) pilots flying the Navy E-2C Hawkeye who manage JTIDS
tracks, 2) ground controllers who fly the Skyeye Unmanned Air
Vehicle as they monitor the Suez Canal, 3) forward observers supporting SOCOM call for fire
maneuvers on the ground, 4) scouts hunting unexploded ordnance at the Buckley
Bombing Range in Colorado and 5) NASA scientists viewing the new "Digital Earth"
space-based imagery. The GeoTIFF architecture gives
these applications blinding speed in terms of map and image slewing, reduced
storage requirements due to the advanced compression protocols, and highly
detailed geo-positioning accuracy to
support targeting missions. This
GeoTIFF-based application won the 1998 Windows World Open competition and
Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates personally helped give the product line
market visibility because he saw the benefits in life saving applications. As we embark on the next
generation of the format, which we call
GeoTIFF 2.0, we have users across the world who are providing suggestions and
valuable feedback about what would help them do their jobs more
effectively. This is one critical
advantage that our SBIR team has is generating the next generation
architecture: we have military users, commercial designers and NASA scientists all working together to
advance the requirements phase of this project. The outcome will therefore have relevance to the GIS community in
a way which is born from field experience and real world applications. Goals of GeoTIFF 2.0 What
is needed is an innovative tool to concatenate the multiple scale datasets for
the region of navigation into a single GeoTIFF file. Seamless viewing should be provided so that the user scrolls and
pans without regard for where one underlying image stops and another
starts. Nesting properties would be
automatically self-declared in this file, so the viewer application running the
file would alert the user if, for example, a higher resolution patch for the
given geographic area were available for display. Finally, efficient and
lossless compression would be employed so that the file would take up the
smallest space without sacrificing real time viewing performance. These are the hallmarks of the next
generation GeoTIFF 2.0 architecture.
Over the next six months the design and specification will be crafted
based on user inputs from the scientific, military and commercial communities about desired features of such a
advanced geographic image file format. For more information
contact Robert A. Severino at Position Integrity
or by email at robert.severino@positionintegrity.com |
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