Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) and the OGR Simple Features Library

The Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL)/OGR Simple Features Library combines two separate libraries that are generally downloaded together as a GDAL. This means that installing the GDAL package also gives access to OGR functionality, which is why they're covered together here. The reason GDAL is covered first is that other packages were written after GDAL, so chronologically, it comes first. As you will notice, some of the packages covered in this chapter extend GDAL's functionality or use it under the hood.

GDAL was created in the 1990s by Frank Warmerdam and saw its first release in June 2000. Later, the development of GDAL was transferred to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). Technically, GDAL is a little different than your average Python package as the GDAL package itself was written in C and C++, meaning that in order to be able to use it in Python, you need to compile GDAL and its associated...