OGR Simple Features Library (part of the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL)) offers a set of tools for dealing with vector data. Although both GDAL and OGR are now more integrated than they used to be, we can still divide GDAL between a vector part (OGR) and a raster part (GDAL). While OGR was written in C++ and the documentation is also in C++, with Python bindings we can access all of GDAL's functionality using Python.
We can distinguish the following components of OGR:
- OGR batch commands for describing and processing vector data
ogrmerge, an instant Python script for merging multiple vector data files- The OGR library itself
We'll briefly cover these components first, before moving on to some examples of how to use all three.
OGR offers a series of batch commands that can be used to describe and convert existing geospatial vector data. We've already mentioned two of them, ogrinfo and ogr2ogr, in Chapter 4, Data Types, Storage, and Conversion...