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.