Problem when converting sosi to shapefile with ogr2ogr on Linux

Question

I am trying to convert a SOSI file (Norwegian geodata format) to a shapefile. I have set up gdal, but apparantly there is a lot of things that I dont have support for. When I do a ./configure, this is the result:

  LIBTOOL support:           yes

  LIBZ support:              external
  LIBLZMA support:           no
  GRASS support:             no
  CFITSIO support:           no
  PCRaster support:          internal
  LIBPNG support:            internal
  DDS support:               no
  GTA support:               no
  LIBTIFF support:           internal (BigTIFF=yes)
  LIBGEOTIFF support:        internal
  LIBJPEG support:           internal
  12 bit JPEG:               yes
  12 bit JPEG-in-TIFF:       yes
  LIBGIF support:            internal
  OGDI support:              no
  HDF4 support:              no
  HDF5 support:              no
  NetCDF support:            no
  Kakadu support:            no
  JasPer support:            no
  OpenJPEG support:          no
  ECW support:               no
  MrSID support:             no
  MrSID/MG4 Lidar support:   no
  MSG support:               no
  GRIB support:              yes
  EPSILON support:           no
  WebP support:              no
  cURL support (wms/wcs/...):no
  PostgreSQL support:        no
  MySQL support:             no
  Ingres support:            no
  Xerces-C support:          no
  NAS support:               no
  Expat support:             no
  libxml2 support:           yes
  Google libkml support:     no
  ODBC support:              no
  PGeo support:              no
  FGDB support:              no
  MDB support:               no
  PCIDSK support:            internal
  OCI support:               no
  GEORASTER support:         no
  SDE support:               no
  Rasdaman support:          no
  DODS support:              no
  SQLite support:            no
  PCRE support:              yes
  SpatiaLite support:        no
  DWGdirect support          no
  INFORMIX DataBlade support:no
  GEOS support:              no
  Poppler support:           no
  Podofo support:            no
  OpenCL support:            no
  Armadillo support:         no
  FreeXL support:            no
  SOSI support:              no


  SWIG Bindings:             no

  Statically link PROJ.4:    no
  enable OGR building:       yes
  enable pthread support:    yes
  enable POSIX iconv support:yes
  hide internal symbols:     no

And doing the command results in this:

~/gdal$ ogr2ogr -f "ESRI Shapefile" /media//Geodata/testing/sosi.sos /Documents/test.shp FAILURE: Unable to open datasource `/Documents/test.shp' with the following drivers.

I am fairly inexperienced with this, so I am trying to learn. What is going on here, what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

According to the manpage http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/SOSI you have to compile the SOSI support yourself.

This is dependent on the operating system (which you have not mentioned) and documented on the page.

If you are on a mac, see also Converting SOSI to ESRI Shape

This page (also available in English) has a link to compiled binaries for Linux and Windows of gdal 1.7.2 at the bottom: http://labs.kartverket.no/sos/

For the Windows version, you might run into some error with libeay32.dll. Deleting the ssleay32.dll solves this problem. Or copy both from a 32-bit version from http://www.gisinternals.com/sdk

Answer 2

One thing that tripped me up when reading SOSI files using GDAL: You need to make sure you have write access to the directories containing the SOSI files. The library creates a temp file in the same directory as the file you are reading from. This is explained in a NOTE on the page http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/SOSI

Also, make sure the environment variable is set:
GDAL_DATA

I figured out what was wrong by setting these environment variables:
CPL_DEBUG=ON
CPL_LOG_ERRORS=ON
CPL_LOG=cpl.log
The cpl.log will contain useful error messages that can help you if you are still having problems.