When most people hear GeoPDF, they think of it as a file format—something akin to a GeoTIFF. And that’s understandable: there is a defined metadata specification used to georegister GeoPDF documents (in fact, there are two—but that’s a story for another day). Yet, publishing a metadata spec alone is not a business plan.

To understand the vision that ultimately drove the TerraGo spinoff, it’s helpful to look at what LGI built for the SBC project. LGI didn’t just create a new file format—it developed an entire system. This included:

• Map and map book creation tools capable of ingesting data from engineering and GIS sources such as AutoCAD, MicroStation, ArcGIS, and even scanned maps.
• Internal metadata specifications that described maps in both geographic and non-geographic terms.
• Software for end users that could interpret and leverage that metadata.
• Integration software to coordinate the interactions among all these components.

In other words, the GeoPDF concept depended on a complete ecosystem: publishing applications, organizational tools, user-facing applications, and curated collections of GeoPDF maps, imagery, and map books. LGI organized this suite of technologies under the name LGIView, with the goal of commercializing it as a coherent software system.

This initiative emerged during a period of explosive growth in geospatial technologies—driven by new location-based services, crowd-sourced data, and high-resolution commercial satellite imagery. In 2005, LGI spun out a new company—TerraGo Technologies—to focus exclusively on the opportunity represented by this integrated system. While GeoPDF was not initially part of the LGIView branding, it was always central to the technology itself.

From Metadata to Experience

From the very beginning, TerraGo viewed the GeoPDF metadata not as a product, but as enabling technology. Once proven, the specific metadata design was of secondary importance. It was never intended to be a formal standard—it was a pragmatic, application-level specification that allowed geospatial data to flow seamlessly through PDF creation and consumption tools.

Although the specification remained an internal document, it was freely shared with partners, and the georegistration data within GeoPDFs was never hidden or proprietary.

But making a TerraGo GeoPDF map has, since the SBC era, always been about much more than the “geo.” It’s about leveraging the interactive power of the PDF format itself. Through features like hyperlinks, layer visibility controls, and embedded attribute data—for example, showing a transformer’s voltage or a property’s ownership details—GeoPDF maps deliver a richer, more actionable user experience.

This difference is why TerraGo Publisher for ArcGIS continues to be valued: it focuses on creating a purposeful end-user experience, not merely exporting a static map. Still, there’s value in the simplicity of just “getting it out there” as a PDF—fancy or not—and that’s a topic for the next installment.