[Liblas-devel] Re: liblas svn and gdal/ogr

[Howard Butler]

On Sep 2, 2009, at 11:28 AM, Jeff Hamann wrote:

> My understanding is that lidar data *is* point data that is  
> processed into something else like raster files, information,  
> "data" (DTMs, etc.).

Yes, definitely.  It can be modeled so many different ways though.   
Pushing things too deeply into GDAL/OGR means taking responsibility  
for it, which is not for someone who's faint of heart at such an  
effort.  Mateusz and I have done enough GDAL development to know where  
the cutoff is in that regard ;)

>
> I've been building an experimental software agent, using open source  
> software, that ingests data and uses the results for optimization  
> and I need process at least 1TB of new lidar data annually.

Neat, I'm working on something similar except it is targeted at Oracle  
Point Clouds.  If PostGIS ever grows a point patch type, it could  
easily be adapted to that as well.  The spatial indexing work that I  
have grinding on the last few months and the new las2oci command in  
the default development branch are the fruits of some of this effort.   
My usages are mostly targeted toward warehousing, so that simplifies a  
lot of what I'm trying to do.

>
> The process right now is as follows:
>
> 1) convert a list of LAS files into shapefiles
> 2) convert the shapefiles to sql for using within PostgreSQL+PostGIS 
> +wktraster+PL/R+plus a ton of other stuff
> 3) import the sql file into the database.
>
> This process takes several hours for a single file and requires that  
> I duplicate the data twice (at least).
>
> Since my shop is just me, I need to generate a ogr2ogr type tool  
> that can be used like:
>
> $ ogr2ogr -f "PostgreSQL" PG:"host=localhost dbname=himom"  
> 'biggen.las' -nln test
>
> so that the lidar data goes directly into the database.

las2ogr already exists.  I think this is what you might want.  http://liblas.org/browser/doc/las2ogr.txt