GDAL is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats that is released under an X/MIT style Open Source license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the calling application for all supported formats. It also comes with a variety of useful commandline utilties for data translation and processing.

The related OGR library (which lives within the GDAL source tree) provides a similar capability for simple features vector data.

GDAL has been primarily developer by Frank Warmerdam until the release of version 1.3.2 when maintainership has been officially turned to the GDAL/OGR Project Management Committee under the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.

GDAL/OGR is considered a major project in the Open Source and also in the commercial GIS community due to its widespread use and comprehensive set of functionalities. In the words of Howard Butler "I see GDAL as the glibc/glibc++ of the geospatial software world. It's open, it provides core functionality, I can't understand how anybody gets anything done without it."

External links

• GDAL/OGR homepage
• GDAL supported formats
• OGR supported formats
• OSGeo project homepage

Free development toolkits and libraries | C++ libraries | Free software | GIS software

GDAL