The slide gives an introduction to GDAL: geospatial data, abstraction, library or framework, getting started and more...

1. 8.1.2017

2. Agenda
1. What is GDAL?
2. Software using GDAL
3. Geospatial Data
4. Abstraction
5. Library or maybe framework?
6. Getting started with GDAL and C#
7. More Information

3. What is GDAL?
● Translator library for raster and vector geospatial data formats
● Started in 1998 by Frank Warmerdam as independent professional
● Now the project is under OSGeo’s umberlla
● Free and Open Source Software
● Written in C++

4. Software using GDAL
QGIS IDRISI ArcGIS 9.2+ gstat
Micromine GRASS GIS libral SpaceEyes3D
PostGIS Geoweb3d pktools MapGuide
Thuban OpenEV OSSIM ERDAS
CartoDB TerrainView GeoServer GMT
Bluemapia Google Earth Fiona GenGIS
MapServer Procura SAGA GIS vGeo

5. GDAL - Geospatial Data Abstraction Library
Data which has a geographical or spatial aspect
Raster - A spatial data model that defines space as an array of
equally sized cells arranged in rows and columns, and composed of
single or multiple bands.
Vector - A coordinate-based data model that represents geographic
features as points, lines, and polygons.

6. GDAL - Geospatial Data Abstraction Library
3 major classes within the GDAL library:
● GDAL - Raster
● OGR - Vector
● OSR - Spatial Reference
What can they do?
Coordinate system conversion, statistics, format conversion, geo operations on
geometries and layers, image merge, build pyramids, create a tileindex, Convert rgb
to indexed color, etc...

7. GDAL - Geospatial Data Abstraction Library
Presents a single raster abstract data model and a single vector abstract data model
to the calling application for all supported formats.
● Supported raster formats (142 drivers) : GeoTIFF, Erdas Imagine, ECW,
JPEG2000, DTED…
● Supported vector formats (84 drivers): ESRI Shapefile, ESRI ArcSDE, ESRI
FileGDB, KML, PostGIS, Oracle Spatial, AutoCAD DWG, Elasticsearch...

8. GDAL - Geospatial Data Abstraction Library
Example for GDAL abstraction:

9. GDAL - Geospatial Data Abstraction Library
Or maybe framework?
● Cross platform - Windows (32, 64 bit), MAC OS X, Linux
● Variety of programming language bindings - Offical: C#, Java. Perl, Python
Unofficial: Go, Lua, Node.js, PHP, Tcl.
● Comes with many useful command line utilities for data translation and
processing
● Extensibility for more geo formats (with plugins)
● Wide community

10. GDAL - Geospatial Data Abstraction Library
Examples for using command line utiltiles:
● ogr2ogr - converts simple features data between file formats
● gdalinfo - lists information about a raster dataset
% ogr2ogr -f "ESRI Shapefile" c:output.shp "PG: host=localhost user=postgres
dbname=gisdb password=postgres" -sql "SELECT name, geom FROM tableName"
% gdalinfo c:input.tiff

11. GDAL - Geospatial Data Abstraction Library
A personal experience about how the
community helped me:
Few months ago, I submitted a new bug
in the GDB driver. Two weeks later the
bug was fixed and published as part of the
next GDAL version.

12. Getting started with GDAL in C#
1. Download the latest version of the precompiled GDAL binaries (32 or 64 bit)
2. Extract the contents from the zip file to a location on your hard disk e.g.
C:Program FilesGDAL
3. Include the path to C:Program FilesGDAL in your PATH system variable and
add path to C:Program FilesGDALgdal-data in a new system variable named
GDAL_DATA
4. Add references to dll-files that can be found at C:Program FilesGDALcsharp
5. Write your code
6. To view the full turorial click here

13. More Information
Links:
● http://www.gdal.org - official GDAL website
● http://www.gisinternals.com - website to download sources
● Getting started with GDAL and C#
● http://svn.osgeo.org/gdal/trunk/gdal/swig/csharp/apps/ - gdal examples in C#
● GDAL dev forum
● https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal - website to submit bugs
Create by: Tomer .L. and Ori .A.

14. Questions?