Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
19.1 Outlook on Geospatial Processing
We have chosen to write about a specific set of command line tools. This choice
was informed by our areas of expertise and, in the case of GDAL/OGR, was due to
its importance as a near ubiquitous geospatial library within the free, open source
geospatial community. Nevertheless, there remain many other tools, data formats,
standards and packages that we have not covered, but that provide other types of
functionality.
19.1.1 Developments in GDAL/OGR
GDAL has had one of the most significant impacts on free, open source geospatial
libraries. Its strength as a stand-alone library and API as well as its widespread inte-
gration within many of the OSGeo packages has advanced the open source geospatial
community substantially. Its development is clearly linked to user feedback as well
as more fundamental changes relating to new types of EO and geospatial data as well
as how these data are served, analyzed and stored.
Given the dynamic nature of the free, open source geospatial community, it is
very difficult to predict the future of GDAL from a user's perspective. However, it is
likely that newprojections and data formats will continue to be added toGDAL/OGR.
Furthermore, the geospatial Standards defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium
are likely to have a significant influence on the direction of GDAL.
Over the last couple of years, there has been an on-going discussion by the
GDAL/OGR developers about a new class hierarchy that would align GDAL and
OGR more closely. This alignment or “unification” represents an important change
to the current design of the libraries. One of the main ideas is that a single dataset can
contain both raster and vector data. Currently, the driver structures for GDAL and
OGR datasets are well separated. The release of this “Grand Unification” is foreseen
in the future, mythical version “2.0”. After several delays, the implementation has
begun, with Even Rouault as the main driving force. One of the challenges of such a
re-design is to ensure backwards compatibility with the API versions. In addition, the
developers seek to use this opportunity to clean up the code and standardise aspects
of the library. However, for the regular user the GDAL/OGR command line utilities
will not be significantly impacted. For instance, some of the suggested modifications
to the command line utilities include
1
:
Standardize command names. Some are
gdal_command
others are
gdal
-
command
;
Running
gdalinfo
-
formats
should list the formats in some meaningful
order;
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