Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL)
Overview
Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) is an open-source library for reading and writing raster and vector geospatial data formats. GDAL provides a single abstract data model for raster data and another for vector data (historically called OGR), allowing applications to work with many different formats through a unified API.
Key Concepts
Driver is a format-specific implementation that handles reading/writing a particular file format. Dataset represents a collection of raster bands or vector layers from a single source. Raster band is a single channel of raster data (e.g., red, green, blue, elevation). OGR is the vector data component of GDAL, providing access to vector formats. Virtual Raster (VRT) is an XML format that describes a virtual dataset composed of other datasets. Warping is the process of reprojecting and resampling raster data to different coordinate systems.
Common Command-Line Tools
| Tool | Purpose |
|---|---|
gdalinfo | Display raster metadata |
ogrinfo | Display vector metadata |
gdal_translate | Convert raster formats |
ogr2ogr | Convert vector formats |
gdalwarp | Reproject and mosaic rasters |
gdal_rasterize | Convert vector to raster |
Supported Formats
GDAL supports 200+ raster and vector formats including:
- Raster: GeoTIFF, COG, NetCDF, HDF, JPEG2000
- Vector: Shapefile, GeoJSON, GeoPackage, PostGIS, FileGDB
Appendix
Created: 2025-12-13 | Modified: 2025-12-13