Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
Introduction
This topic is designed as a reference and a tutorial to a number of open source
geospatial command line utilities. It intends to demonstrate the power and flexibility
of command line utilities to the novice user as well as serving as a reference to the
more experienced user. We have designed the topic in a way that enables the novice
user to get started with these tools and gradually develop their understanding and
capabilities. We are aware that depending on your background and interest, some
chapters, and consequently, some software packages, will be of more relevance to
you than others. Nonetheless, we feel that in order to provide a complete treatment
of open source geospatial utilities, it is necessary to deal with each of these topics in
turn and to present their respective tools. We note that it is beyond the scope of this
topic to present each and every command line geospatial tool that is available. Such
a topic would probably consist of numerous tomes and would end-up presenting the
same analysis with different tools. We have therefore focused our attention on:
•
Geospatial Data Abstration Library (GDAL)
•
pktools
•
Orfeo ToolBox
•
SPDlib.
The reasons for covering GDAL are simple: it is the most widely used open source
geospatial package currently available and forms the back-bone of a wide range of
other open source GIS and remote sensing programs. Furthermore, GDAL is one
of the most widely used Spatial ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) toolkits. Orfeo
Toolbox and pktools are also addressed. The former provides a comprehensive set of
command line utilities for processing Earth observation data, while the latter provides
an extended set of specialized tools that have been developed and maintained by one
of the authors using the GDAL Application Programming Interface.
Although we do not cover other geospatial libraries, it is worthwhile listing some
of the other main packages that are available and widely discussed on-line and within
the geospatial community. Some of the official OSGeo packages include:
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