The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is seeking public comment on the Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) Candidate Standard, which aims to formalize, as an OGC Standard, existing practices already implemented by the community, such as the GDAL library or the COG explorer and other implementations. Comments are due by 17 September, 2022. COG allows for efficient streaming and partial downloading of imagery and grid coverage data on the web and enables fast data visualization and geospatial processing workflows. COG-aware applications can efficiently stream/download only the parts of the information they need to visualize or process web-based data. With so much remote sensing imagery available in cloud storage facilities, the benefits of optimizing their visualization and processing will be widespread. COG is one of the preferred formats used in STAC catalogs, and sits alongside other emerging cloud-optimized formats of relevance to OGC, such as Zarr, COPC, and GeoParquet.
