The Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) is a computer software library for reading and writing raster and vector geospatial data formats (e.g. shapefile), and is released under the permissive X/MIT style free software 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 may also be built with a variety of useful command line interface utilities for data translation and processing. Projections and transformations are supported by the PROJ library.
The related OGR library (OGR Simple Features Library), which is part of the GDAL source tree, provides a similar ability for simple features vector graphics data.
GDAL was developed mainly by Frank Warmerdam until the release of version 1.3.2, when maintenance was officially transferred to the GDAL/OGR Project Management Committee under the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.
GDAL/OGR is considered a major free software project for its "extensive capabilities of data exchange" and also in the commercial GIS community due to its widespread use and comprehensive set of functionalities.
Supported raster data formats As of version 2.2.3, GDAL/OGR provides at least partial support for 154 raster and 93 vector geospatial data formats. A subset of data formats is supported to ensure the ability to directly create files and georeferencing them with the default GDAL compiling options.
Here follows the list of data formats whose support is, by default, compiled to allow creation and georeferencing.
Raster data format name Code Arc/Info ASCII Grid AAIGrid ADRG/ARC Digitalized Raster Graphics (.gen/.thf) ADRG Bathymetric Attributed Grid (.bag) BAG Magellan BLX Topo (.blx, .xlb) BLX Microsoft Windows Device Independent Bitmap (.bmp) BMP VTP Binary Terrain Format (.bt) BT Military Elevation Data (.dt0, .dt1, .dt2) DTED ESRI .hdr Labelled EHdr NASA ELAS ELAS ENVI .hdr Labelled Raster ENVI ERMapper (.ers) ERS NOAA .gtx vertical datum shift GTX HF2/HFZ heightfield raster HF2 Erdas Imagine (.img) HFA Image Display and Analysis (WinDisp) IDA ILWIS Raster Map (.mpr,.mpl) ILWIS Intergraph Raster INGR USGS Astrogeology Isis cube (Version 2) ISIS2 KMLSUPEROVERLAY KMLSUPEROVERLAY In Memory Raster MEM Vexcel MFF MFF Vexcel MFF2 MFF2 (HKV) NITF NITF NTv2 Datum Grid Shift NTv2 PCI Geomatica Database File PCIDSK Raster Matrix Format (*.rsw, .mtw) RMF Idrisi Raster RST SAGA GIS Binary format SAGA SGI Image Format SGI SRTM HGT Format SRTMHGT USGS ASCII DEM / CDED (.dem) USGSDEM GDAL Virtual (.vrt) VRT ASCII Gridded XYZ XYZ
Supported vector data formats
GDAL supports a variety of vector data formats as seen here. It is extensible as well.
References
Notes
External links
OSGeo project homepage