Point Cloud ad hoc meeting outcomes

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Point Cloud ad hoc meeting on Monday 1st June. There were over 60 people registered for the event with approximately half that calling in via the goto meeting session.

The meeting was very constructive and, despite some technical hurdles, we were able to get the two remote presenters dialed into the session. Multiple presenters offered concrete proposals for activities for the OGC to consider and spurred very useful discussions amongst participants. Everything was recorded, however please bear with us as we get the recording processed and uploaded. This is one meeting in a very busy schedule of meetings this week.

Key outcomes from the meeting:

 1. The representative from Intergraph moved to create a Point Cloud Domain Working Group in the OGC. This motion was supported by a number of other members including Envitia, Oracle, ESRI, NASA, OSGeo and a number of others. The charter will be drafted during the course of the week. The Domain Working Group will be open to public participation. First work items for consideration will be the authoring of a Best Practice on the use of the current standards / de facto standards in the LiDAR community and a possible Interoperability Experiment.

 2. Commitment to explore the creation of a Standards Working Group for work with the LAS format as highlighted in Michael Gerlek's presentation. However, participants agreed that this must be undertaken in collaboration with ASPRS. OGC staff will take the action to follow up with ASPRS and determine the next steps.

The presentations from the day are available at the links below:

•Scott Simmons, OGC: Introduction to Point Cloud discussion and summary of standards efforts 
•Jeff Young, ASPRS: ASPRS activities with LiDAR data (please note this was a verbal presentation, therefore there are no slides)
•Chris Little, UK Met Office: What (where and when) is the Point in Meteorology 
•Keith Ryden, Esri: Enterprise community requirements for point clouds  
•Jason Smith, Exelis (NGA): Sensor Independent Point Cloud (SIPC) data format, a profile of HDF5 
•Michael Gerlek, RadiantBlue: Current situation and future work for point clouds 
•Peter Baumann: Point clouds in coverages   
•Martin Isenburg, OSGeo: Open Source community drivers for point cloud standards 
•Doug O’Brien, IDON Technologies: ISO and point cloud standards