The potential additional information includes map projection, coordinate systems, ellipsoids, datums, and everything else necessary to establish the exact spatial reference for the file.
The GeoTIFF format was originally created by Dr. Niles Ritter while he was working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
[3] On September 14, 2019, the Open Geospatial Consortium published the OGC GeoTIFF standard,[4] which defines the Geographic Tag Image File Format (GeoTIFF) by specifying requirements and encoding rules for using the Tag Image File Format (TIFF) for the exchange of georeferenced or geocoded imagery.
The pattern of optimizing GeoTIFFs for HTTP range requests was first demonstrated at large scale when AWS started hosting Landsat data on Amazon S3 in 2015.
[8] The COG format can be read and written by many common geographic software tools including GDAL, QGIS, and GeoTrellis.