1. Introduction
What is GDAL
GDAL
is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats that is released
under an X/MIT style Open Source license by the Open Source Geospatial
Foundation. As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the
calling application for all supported formats. It also comes with a variety of
useful commandline utilities for data translation and processing. See for more info: http://www.gdal.org
Learning objectives
After this course you will be able to:
- Retrieve information from GIS data
- Reproject GIS data
- Change raster properties
- Convert raster formats
- Convert vector formats
- Apply spatial queries on vectors
- Convert comma separated values files
- Perform batch conversion
Software
For these
exercises GDAL needs to be installed, preferably using the OSGEO4W distribution
package. If you have installed QGIS, the OSGEO4W distribution is already there.
Otherwise check:
The
GDAL website: http://www.gdal.org
The
OSGEO4W website: http://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo4w/
Exercise data
The exercise data can be downloaded from the main page. It contains:
roads.shp: road map from OpenStreetMap (http://openstreetmap.org)
srtm_37_02.tif: tile of a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) from the Shuttle Radar
Topography Mission (SRTM) (http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/)
gem_2011_gn1.shp: borders
of Dutch communities, freely available from CBS (Statistics Netherlands) and
Kadaster (http://www.cbs.nl).
Locations.csv: table with object locations.
landuse.zip: contains land-use time series in IDRISI format.