Including SAGA grid as GDAL-supported format

-----Original Message-----
From: Roger Bivand [mailto:Roger.Bivand at nhh.no]
Sent: Friday, October 16, 2009 11:06 AM
To: Tomislav Hengl
Cc: r-sig-geo at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [R-sig-Geo] Including SAGA grid as GDAL-supported format

On Fri, 16 Oct 2009, Tomislav Hengl wrote:

Dear r-sig-geo,

I would like to initiate the processes of registering the SAGA grid format
under GDAL (the SAGA 2.0.4 source code is available for download here
http://sourceforge.net/projects/saga-gis/files/SAGA%20-

%202.0/SAGA%202.0.4/saga_2.0.4_src.zip/download).

Do I have to follow some formal procedure, or do I have to prepare the GDAL
driver myself (as explained at http://www.gdal.org/gdal_drivertut.html)? Any
help/suggestions are welcome (apparently it should not be too complicated).

Tom,

Writing a read-only driver would be the first step. Once that works, it
could be extended to copy creation, and finally to direct creation if
justified. If SAGA I/O has a separate I/O library, it could be shipped
with the driver as in the pcraster driver, but I don't see one in the
source tree. Writing a driver for SAGA rasters would permit lots of other
software to interact with SAGA, not just in R, so would be more robust.

You'd develop on a local copy of the GDAL source, and once done submit a
file archive of the directory to Frank Warmerdam or other GDAL people.
Maybe ask on the GDAL developers' list if they have seen questions about
SAGA rasters before. Are SAGA rasters similar to any existing supported
formats (Erdas?, IDRISI?, ILWIS?) - could an existing driver be copied and
modified?

Roger