Subject: Georeferenced TIFF Release 0.1

From: [email-masked] (Niles D. Ritter)
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 1995 17:37:45 -0700

This is an announcement of the Beta release of a new set of TIFF
tag extensions for georeferencing raster data within the TIFF 6.0
interchange format.  The extension is called GeoTIFF and is the result of a 
collaboration between over 100 remote sensing, surveying and
cartographic raster data providers and users, including SPOT Image,
ARC/INFO, ERDAS, MapInfo, ER Mapper, PCI, JPL Cartographic group, and the USGS.
The extension uses tags registered to Aldus/Adobe, and is fully
compliant with the TIFF 6.0 standard, using no private directories,
binary structures or proprietary implementations. 

The GeoTIFF format is not intended to be a competitor with a full
featured metadata standard such as as the Canadian SAIF, the 
USGS SDTS standard, or the FGDC metadata standard. It is merely
an effort to encapsulate into the popular TIFF standard data elements
for encoding the datums, ellipsoids, projections, tiepoints, etc, so that
the raster data can be precisely tied down to the surface of the earth.

The USGS is planning on releasing prototype versions of their 7.5 minute
quadrangles on CD-ROM in their "DRG" (Digital Raster Graphic) format,
which in turn will be based on the GeoTIFF spec. Other providers such
as SPOT Image will also be releasing products in this format, and 
many of the companies listed above have committed to producing an 
import/export capability in support of GeoTIFF.

GeoTIFF is currently at Revision 0.1 (Beta), and following several
months of comments and critiques will be promoted to Revision 1.0
(Final), with further revisions and extensions on a yearly basis, if
necessary.

For more information, a WWW page in now enabled, and is located at:

   http://www-mipl.jpl.nasa.gov/~ndr/cartlab/geotiff/geotiff.html

Which has pointers to hypertext versions of the specification. The
spec and related source code is also available via FTP to

     ftp://mtritter.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/geotiff/

or its mirror site at:

   ftp://ftpmcmc.cr.usgs.gov/release/geotiff/

A mailing list has been created for discussing the development 
of this standard; to subscribe send email to 

    [email-masked]

with subject: none and the body of the message reading:

    subscribe geotiff  your-name-here.

The address of the mailing list itself is [email-masked].

  --Niles Ritter (admin, geotiff mailing-list).