[gdal-dev] About new GDAL/OGR drivers

[Even Rouault]

Hi all,

I've neglected to mention a few of the GDAL/OGR drivers that I have recently  
added into trunk since 1.7 release. For those that like doing early testing 
and write useful bug reports so that those new drivers are in shape for the 
1.8.0 release, here's a summary :

GDAL drivers :
* HF2/HFZ ( http://gdal.org/frmt_hf2.html ) : heightfield raster datasets that 
can be compressed. Read/write support.
* JP2OpenJPEG ( http://gdal.org/frmt_jp2openjpeg.html ) : another (the 5th!) 
JPEG2000 driver, based on the open-source OpenJpeg library (BSD-licenced). 
More potential than Jasper with big images, but depends on an (yet) unreleased 
development branch of OpenJpeg. Read/write support.
* XYZ ( http://gdal.org/frmt_xyz.html ) : to access simple gridded ASCII files. 
Read/write support.
* GeoPDF ( http://gdal.org/frmt_geopdf.html ) : to extract both georeferencing 
and rasterize PDF documents, that have georeferencing encoded in either of the 
2 current existing ways : the OGC GeoPDF encoding best practice (promoted by 
TerraGo), or according to the Adobe Supplement to ISO 32000. Read-only, based 
on poppler library (GPL-licenced)

OGR drivers :
* GPSBabel ( http://gdal.org/ogr/drv_gpsbabel.html ) : leverages the 
capabilities of the GPSBabel utility (GPL-licenced) to read/write many GPS file 
formats.
* OpenAir ( http://gdal.org/ogr/drv_openair.html ) and SUA ( 
http://gdal.org/ogr/drv_sua.html ) : 2 fairly equivalent and special-purpose 
drivers to read text files describing Special Use Airspaces.
* PDS ( http://gdal.org/ogr/drv_pds.html ) : another fairly specialized driver 
to extract tabular information from NASA PDS  (Planetary Data Systems) files
* PGDump ( http://gdal.org/ogr/drv_pgdump.html ) : I believe I alrealdy 
mentionned that one. A write-only driver to generate SQL dump files that can be 
later injected into a live PostgreSQL instance. More or less similar to 
PostGIS shp2pgsql utility
* WFS ( http://gdal.org/ogr/drv_wfs.html ) : a WFS/WFS-T client that can read 
and write OGC WFS 1.0.0 and 1.1.0 services.

The GML driver was also significantly upgraded, in particular to support more 
GML3 geometries, more complex documents with non-flat structures and various 
tweaks that help reading some GML application schemas (CityGML, AIXM) etc... 
For more details about that... and the work done by all the others GDAL 
contributors, you can have a look at the preliminary NEWS : 
http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/browser/trunk/gdal/NEWS

How testing those new stuff ?
- Unix/Linux users : checkout GDAL svn trunk (or daily snapshot from 
http://gdal.org/daily/ ), configure, make, make install ;-)
- Windows users : build from source, or use for example Tamas Szekeres' daily 
builds at http://vbkto.dyndns.org/sdk/  (Note that those builds don't 
currently include JP2OpenJPEG and GeoPDF due to the external dependencies). I 
believe that gdal-dev in osgeo4w has also been recently updated with a 
1.8.0dev snapshot.

Have fun,

Even