Summary

In this chapter you learned the hierarchy of geospatial analysis software including the following key elements:

  • Hundreds of geospatial software packages and libraries exist
  • All geospatial software can be categorized as:
    • Data access
    • Computational geometry
    • Raster processing
    • Desktop tools
    • Metadata management
  • Nearly all significant geospatial software is dependent on four libraries
    • GDAL – raster data access
    • OGR – vector data access
    • PROJ.4 – geospatial data reprojection
    • GEOS – computational geometry
  • Raster processing software is very fragmented with many packages and frequent custom solutions
  • If you come across new software trace it to the four core libraries and ask "what is the value added?"
  • If you can't trace the software to one of the four core libraries ...

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