OGR Simple Features Library
OGR is part of the FWTools package that's available at http://fwtools.maptools.org. The OGR project home page (http://www.gdal.org/ogr) describes OGR as:
... a C++ open source library (and command line tools) providing read (and sometimes write) access to a variety of vector file formats including ESRI Shapefiles, S-57, SDTS, PostGIS, Oracle Spatial, and Mapinfo mid/mif and TAB formats.
Tip
The historical definition of the acronym OGR is irrelevant today, but it's used throughout the code base, making it difficult to change.
OGR supports more than 16 different vector formats and has utilities similar to GDAL's raster utilities.
Vector Formats Supported by OGR
The following list of the vector data formats supported by OGR was taken from the OGR formats web page at http://www.gdal.org/ogr/ogr_formats.html. The web page also shows which formats can be written or only read by OGR.
| Arc/Info Binary Coverage |
| ESRI shapefile |
| DODS/OPeNDAP |
| FMEObjects Gateway |
| GML |
| IHO S-57 (ENC) |
| Mapinfo file |
| Microstation DGN |
| OGDI vectors |
| ODBC |
| Oracle Spatial |
| PostgreSQL |
| SDTS |
| UK .NTF |
| U.S. Census TIGER/Line |
| VRT: Virtual Datasource |
OGR is part of the GDAL/OGR project and is packaged with GDAL. GDAL deals with raster or image data, and OGR deals with vector data. GDAL is to painting as OGR is to connect-the-dot drawings. These data access and conversion libraries cover the breadth of mapping data.
OGR Utilities and Examples
Like GDAL, OGR consists of a set of libraries that can be used in applications. It also ...
Get Web Mapping Illustrated now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
