Project Goals
- PDAL is a library which provides APIs for reading, writing, and
processing geospatial point cloud data of various formats. Additionally, some
command line tools are provided. As GDAL is to 2D pixels, OGR is to
geospatial vector geometry, PDAL is to multidimensional points.
- From a market perspective, PDAL is “version 2” of libLAS. The actual
code base will be different, however, and the APIs will not be
compatible.
- The PDAL implementation has high performance, yet the API remains
flexible. We recognize that these two goals will conflict at times and
will weigh the tradeoffs pragmatically.
- The architecture of a PDAL-based workflow will be a pipeline of
connected stages, each stage being either a data source (such as a file
reader), a filter (such as a point thinner), or data sink (such as a
file writer).
- The PDAL library will be written in C++. PDAL will support multiple platforms, specifically
Windows, Linux, and Mac.
- PDAL is open source and is released under a BSD license. See License for
more information.