[OSGeo-Announce] OSGeo is pleased to welcome the Mesh Data Abstraction Library (MDAL) to our Community program.

[Astrid Emde (OSGeo)]

See News Item 
https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/osgeo-community-program-welcomes-the-mesh-data-abstraction-library-mdal-project/

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation is pleased to welcome the Mesh 
Data Abstraction Library (MDAL) to our Community program.

MDAL is a translator library for more than 15 unstructured mesh 
geospatial formats used mainly in meteorology and hydrology.

The OSGeo Community program recognizes applications and tools that are 
geospatial, freely available with an open source license, and are setup 
to collaborate fairly. This program helps OSGeo promote innovation and 
the hard work of teams and organizations worldwide. “It’s great to see 
MDAL as a community project as it fulfils a vital function in opening up 
the use of mesh frameworks in popular open source GIS packages such as 
QGIS, says Jo Cook, OSGeo Incubation Committee.


The MDAL projects addresses lowering the barrier to meteorological and 
hydrological data using geospatial toolkits. The driver provides low 
level I/O to access unstructured mesh data for the purpose of 
visualisation, processing and editing. MDAL is under active development 
and being sponsored by industry-lead organisations.


The project source code is hosted on GitHub. 
https://github.com/lutraconsulting/MDAL
Documentation and information about supported data formats can be found 
at the MDAL website. https://www.mdal.xyz/

About the MDAL project
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In addition to vectors and regular gridded data in GIS, the real world 
can be modelled using unstructured mesh. In addition to the complex data 
structure, the mesh can also contain vectoral (e.g. wind speed) and 
temporal data. The common conventions to store such datasets are 
Hierarchical Data Format (HDF), Network Common Data Form (NetCDF), 
GRIdded Binary (GRIB) or ASCII formats. There are already tools to 
convert the formats to common raster or vector datasets. But with MDAL, 
software applications can natively read the data.

An example of integration of MDAL with other OSGeo projects can be found 
in QGIS: mesh layer provides the input/output data through MDAL driver 
and QGIS is being used to render and process the data.

About the Open Source Geospatial Foundation
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation is a not-for-profit 501(c)(4) 
organization to empower everyone with open source geospatial. The 
software foundation directly supports projects serving as an outreach 
and advocacy organization providing financial, organizational and legal 
support for the open source geospatial community.

OSGeo works with GeoCat, OPENGIS.ch, Gaia3D and other sponsors, along 
with our partners to foster an open approach to software, standards, 
data and education.