The Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) is a computer software library for reading and writing raster and vector geospatial data formats (e.g. shapefile), and is released under the permissive X/MIT style free software license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the calling application for all supported formats. It may also be built with a variety of useful command line interface utilities for data translation and processing. Projections and transformations are supported by the PROJ library. The related OGR library (OGR Simple Features Library ), which is part of the GDAL source tree, provides a similar ability for simple features vector graphics data. GDAL was developed mainly by Frank Warmerdam until the release of version 1.3.2, when maintenance was officially transferred to the GDAL/OGR Project Management Committee under the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. GDAL/OGR is considered a major free software project for its "extensive capabilities of data exchange" and also in the commercial GIS community due to its widespread use and comprehensive set of functionalities.

Software using GDAL/OGR

Several software programs use the GDAL/OGR libraries to allow them to read and write multiple GIS formats. Such programs include:

Supported raster data formats

As of version 2.2.3, GDAL/OGR provides at least partial support for 154 raster and 93 vector geospatial data formats. A subset of data formats is supported to ensure the ability to directly create files and georeferencing them with the default GDAL compiling options. Here follows the list of data formats whose support is, by default, compiled to allow creation and georeferencing.

Supported vector data formats

GDAL supports a variety of vector data formats as seen here. It is extensible as well.