Introduction - Open Source Geospatial Tools: Applications in Earth Observation - page 15

Fig. 1.8 Orfeo toolbox's monteverdi2
programs, you may prefer to use the topic as a reference to the individual packages
and/or chapters they appear in; or you may be interested in how specific types of
geoprocessing are applied to a particular type of geospatial dataset. If this is the case,
we suggest that you consult the table of contents and the topic index to navigate
your reading of the topic. To facilitate browsing over the available utilities, we also
provide a list with a brief description of each utility what it does at the beginning of
this topic.
All chapters begin with an introductory paragraph. For the chapters that cover
OGR/GDAL and third party tools, utilities are ordered into sections and follow a
similar structure. A short paragraph outlining its scope is followed by a print out
of the command line utilities help file. Then we list the command line options and
arguments, which are located within gray boxes and denote that they were written
by the original developers and is therefore verbatim from what is included on-line.
We have tried to present at least one example and demonstration for each utility
using a relevant spatial dataset. Where possible, we have intended to interlink the
examples by reusing the output datasets in subsequent parts of the topic.
The command line utilities we cover can be run on a variety of operating systems.
In some cases the examples presented in this topic are demonstrated using a Linux
based operating system (e.g. Ubuntu or Debian). The reason for this is simply that
we intend to show the potential of the GDAL tools when combined with standard
scripting tools (shell and Python scripting) available on Linux out of the box, but
which can also be replicated onMicrosoft Windows (Windows) or Mac OS, provided
that some of the Unix command line utilities (e.g. grep and awk) have been correctly
installed. The advantage of using Mac OS over Windows is that it offers a terminal
that is Unix based and seamlessly supports the Linux commands that we use in
conjunction with the GDAL tools. On Windows, apart from the DOS terminal where
the standard GDAL tools can be run, free tools such as Cygwin are available that
emulate a Linux terminal with all its flavors. For readers that only have access to