Update: Solicitation for BigTIFF Project
Update 12/24: Frank Warmerdam writes: “I just wanted everyone to know we have our fourth sponsor and BigTIFF is a go!”
What a nice holiday present!
Original Post:
This from Frank Warmerdam (who is OSGEO president, though this is not an OSGEO project):
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 [here].
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. [Contact info is at the page above.]
For those who’ve not been involved in this sort of work, soliciting funding for specific coding is becoming increasingly popular in the standards and open source worlds. In this case $24,000 will put a programmer on task. So, if this work is important to you, or your organization, consider sponsorship. I for one am enjoying watching the month of Open Street Map, where funders literally ponied up a fee for one day of work each.
