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

• DOMINUS MIHI ADIUTOR: Thank you. I am using Linux. I have compiled the SOSI- support myself, but apparantly I need to add the -DSOSI_ENABLED option. However, I am unsure where to do that. It was at labs.kartverket.no/sos someone said this
• AndreJ: Maybe a typo? Looking into the configure file github.com/kartverket/gdal/blob/trunk/gdal/configure, --with-sosi sets SOSI_ENABLED=YES.
• DOMINUS MIHI ADIUTOR: Perhaps. Well, I did follow a guide, and did the with-sosi option. I can try again, maybe it didn't work.
• ThomasG77: Does you configure ouput SOSI support: yes. After when compiling, you can also try to do a make clean before to no keep "garbage" between compilation with different params due do configure changes.

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.