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The PerryGeo blog ask an interesting question about comparing FDO, GDAL/OGR and FME. From the blog: " FDO, GDAL and FME all seem to operate in roughly the same domain - Providing a data model, API and tools to translate between spatial data formats. Does anyone know of any good write-ups comparing/contrasting the features of these three libraries?" Read the very informative answers on the blog. See also related stories below.

The GDAL mailing list announced the release of GDAL/OGR 1.4.3. Here's the bugfix list and new features. GDAL is quite mature, being used by ESRI, Google, most open source geospatial software and many more. From the official site: "GDAL is a translator library for raster geospatial data formats that is released under an X/MIT style Open Source 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 also comes with a variety of useful commandline utilities for data translation and processing. [...] The related OGR library (which lives within the GDAL source tree) provides a similar capability for simple features vector data." Copied below is a link to the previous story on comparing FDO, GDAL/OGR and FME. Update: 11/02 18:14 GMT by S : Wouhou! A colleague just made me realize the GDAL WMS driver is included in this release, and with little efforts, we made it work. This is great news and a new easy way to add WMS support for projects which uses GDAL/OGR. However, I don't know yet to which extent the driver can be considered mature or not.

The wonderful GDAL/OGR now has a new addition, Mateusz Loskot developed a GeoJSON driver for OGR. To refresh our minds, GeoJSON was introduced last month. From the blog entry: "The GeoJSON format fits very well the same niches as GML, like geospatial data interchange over network. Currently, GeoJSON is supported as output format of services implemented by FeatureServer, GeoServer and CartoWeb. [...] The OGR GeoJSON driver provides implementation of functions transforming GeoJSON encoded data to objects of OGR Simple Features model: Datasource, Layer, Feature, Geometry." With the new GDAL/OGR 1.4.3 now including WMS support, one can wonder what GDAL/OGR will not be able to do in the future! ;-)

Here's a few recent geoblog entries that I found interesting on the topic of tools to share information. First is the ability to use OpenLayers as a data converter: " OpenLayers Data Conversion is a new service that allows easy conversion from any of the formats that OpenLayers supports to any of the formats that OpenLayers supports. Simply paste your data, choose your format, and hit convert." Next is the capacity of GDAL 1.5 to import spatial references from URLs using, as an example, the SpatialReference.org website. And finally, PerryGeo demonstrate a quick way to publish a point shapefile to html, using a single command.

The OSGeo-Announce mailing list informs us the open source GDAL/OGR 1.5.0 has been released. Considering the almost ubiquitous use of GDAL in open source and proprietary software, this is doubtlessly great news, especially with the numerous new drivers included for 1.5.0. Mateusz Loskot provides a few statistics: "more than 420 tickets closed on the Trac, implemented 17 new GDAL drivers for raster formats, and 4 new OGR drivers for vectors, implemented 4 (5 counting RFC 16) RFC documents, added 5 new command line utilities, plus, big number of features and improvements in SWIG bindings for scripting languages." In related news, Proj.4 4.6.0 has also been released.