This document provides a justification to the OGC Technical Committee (TC) for consideration of LAZ Specification Version 1.4 - R1 as a Community standard. This justification, along with the submitted candidate Community standard, will form the basis for TC review and vote to approve the start of a Work Item as the first step in the Community standard process for this standard.

The submitters agree to abide by the TC Policies and Procedures and OGC Intellectual Property Rights Policy (http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/policies) during the processing of this submission.

Once approved, the Community standard Work Item defined by this document is valid for six (6) months.

LAZ 1.4 provides a lossless compression scheme for LiDAR in binary LAS format version 1.4. LAZ compressed files are only 7 to 25 percent of the original file size. Compression and decompression can happen on-the-fly in a streaming manner. Random-access is supported with a default granularity of 50,000 points. For LAS point data record formats 6 to 10, LAZ 1.4 added support for random-access to subsets of fields of the point data.

A reference implementation unencumbered by patents or intellectual property concerns is freely available with an Apache 2.0 license, making the LAZ 1.4 compression scheme suitable to become an OGC Community Standard.

Esri: LAZ 1.4 is based on the already approved LAS 1.4 OGC Community Standard (document 17-030r1 published 2018-03-01). It provides efficient compression and storage of LAS data compared to the original LAS 1.4 specification. LAZ 1.4 is widely used in the geospatial domain in government, academia, research, and commercial environments. Further, the LAZ IP was relicensed from LGPL license to Apache 2.0 license by Isenburg Estate in October 2021: https://rapidlasso.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/LASzip_Apache2.0_signed_.pdf. This change was significant to the community and made publishing LAZ 1.4 as a Community Standard both possible and desirable.

NOAA: NOAA began storing and distributing lidar in the ASPRS LAS format in the early 2000’s. The format was designed for lidar interchange and serves our purposes well for containing the information. It rapidly became the de-facto standard lidar format. The LAS files are large, and a compressed format was needed with the same information content to make data distribution and archiving economical. The economies provided by LAZ as a compressed version of LAS were the primary motivation for NOAA to begin storing and archiving in LAZ format as soon as it was feasible to do so. NOAA further desires to see LAZ as an OGC community standard to improve FAIR principles for lidar data. Having the data archived in an OGC standard also supports the longevity of this data for future generations. While many software packages already support the LAZ format, becoming a standard is expected to encourage additional software support and increase data accessibility.

USGS: The US Geological Survey (USGS) supports the approval of LAZ as an OGC community standard. As the National theme lead for terrestrial elevation, USGS has a responsibility to provide authoritative elevation data to the public. USGS has been providing lidar point cloud data since 2006, primarily in LAS format. We currently disseminate over 65 trillion points from over 2100 projects freely to the public. In 2018 we converted all our LAS to LAZ, which resulted in a substantial decrease in storage size of our holdings, and as a result a major cost savings in storage. USGS looks forward to a successful adoption of LAZ as an OGC community standard.

NRCan: The LAZ 1.4 format offers cutting-edge compression techniques that significantly reduce the file size of lidar point clouds (i.e. up to 6 times compared to the LAS 1.4 OGC standard) which, given Canada’s size and the large lidar datasets NRCan is typically faced with, makes this format highly convenient for storage, dissemination, data transfer and collaboration. Since 2015, the LAZ format (more specifically version 1.4) has been the format recommended by NRCan and its main partners in Canada for all aspects of lidar point clouds, including through the Canadian Federal Lidar Data Acquisition Guideline, maintained by NRCan. The format is robust, efficient and widely used in the Canadian lidar community and beyond, including by our US neighbors. The latter point is central to ensure seamless integration of transboundary datasets. By endorsing LAZ 1.4 as a Community Standard, NRCan is promoting greater interoperability between the different software, tools and platforms used in Canada to process, manage and disseminate lidar data. NRCan hopes that the future LAZ 1.4 Community Standard will encourage more of the industry’s major players to adopt this format in their software. Finally, by endorsing the LAZ 1.4 OGC Community Standard, NRCan advances its mission to improve data accessibility and usability for better decision-making, natural resources management and geospatial innovation.

LAZ 1.4 is dependent and built upon the binary LAS format version 1.4. The general LAS file structure, e.g. the header format, is used for the LAZ format too. Modifications to LAS will usually also require modifications to LAZ.

LAZ 1.4 would be a parallel Community Standard to the LAS 1.4 Community Standard. They occupy the same space with the LAZ implementation bringing the advantage of compression. Some people might question two standards in the same space, but there is both precedence and justification:

The LAZ format is the de facto industry standard for compressed LiDAR and has been widely used in government, academia and industry for many years. Most LiDAR software packages today already support the LAZ format. The implementation list is long. A few examples of supporting OGC Members who have implemented LAZ 1.4 in their software:

The following implementations use the proposed Community standard:

The LAZ format is the de facto industry standard for compressed LiDAR and has been widely used in government, academia and industry for many years. An example of the long usage of LAZ by large institutions is NOAA, which began using LAZ for data distribution in early 2012: https://x.com/kirk_waters/status/167680013058064385.

Most LiDAR software packages already support the LAZ format. Some implementation examples of supporting OGC Members are listed in the previous topic. Additionally, the LAZ format is used in large collections of LIDAR and Point Cloud data within government, academia, and industry, covering trillions of data points. For example, publicly available data in LAZ format is provided by:

Is the proposed Community standard currently publicly available?

URL: https://rapidlasso.de/laszip/, https://downloads.rapidlasso.de/doc/LAZ_Specification_1.4_R1.pdf

US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

US Geological Survey (USGS)

Natural Resources Canada (NRCan)

Bentley

Esri

Hexagon

Trimble

Teledyne Geospatial Caris and Optech

Geoscience Australia

IGN - France

ISPRS

Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG)

National Land Survey of Finland

swisstopo

Will the contributor retain intellectual property rights?

If yes, the contributor will be required to work with OGC staff to properly attribute the submitter’s intellectual property rights.

If no, the contributor will assign intellectual property rights to the OGC.