Reading and writing geospatial data
While you could in theory write your own parser to read a particular geospatial data format, it is much easier to use an existing Python library to do this. We will look at two popular libraries for reading and writing geospatial data: GDAL and OGR.
GDAL/OGR
Unfortunately, the naming of these two libraries is rather confusing. Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL), was originally just a library for working with raster geospatial data, while the separate OGR library was intended to work with vector data. However, the two libraries are now partially merged, and are generally downloaded and installed together under the combined name of "GDAL". To avoid confusion, we will call this combined library GDAL/OGR and use "GDAL" to refer to just the raster translation library.
A default installation of GDAL supports reading 116 different raster file formats, and writing to 58 different formats. OGR by default supports reading 56 different vector file formats,...
