The Geospatial Data Abstraction Library

Abstract This chapter presents an overview of the development and characteristics of the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL), a widely used Open Source library for reading and writing a large variety of raster spatial data formats. The library has evolved substantially since its origins in 1998. It supports its own data model and application programming interface (API). From its initial single developer origins, GDAL has grown into a distributed project that has a relatively large number of contributing developers. The chapter discusses the origins of the project, its design philosophy, the data model, and directions for future development.