Write Your Own Geospatial Utilities - Open Source Geospatial Tools: Applications in Earth Observation - page 233

Fig. 14.8 GDAL data model
14.3.2 The GDAL Raster Data Model
The GDAL raster data model is presented in Fig. 14.8 . This representation is not
complete, but it gives an overview of the most important classes to handle raster
datasets. The relation between the classes is indicated by the connectors. An object
of class GDALDataset can hold multiple objects from class GDALRasterband .
A simplified interpretation is to see a GDALDataset object as a raster file that
can hold multiple bands, each represented by a GDALRasterband object. For
completeness, it is important to mention that some file formats can hold more than
one (sub-)dataset per file, e.g. as HDF4/5, NetCDF and GeoTIFF. An example of a
HDF4 file format is provided in Sect. 3.3 on complex datasets.