# Project Goals

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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).
5. The PDAL library will be written in C++. PDAL will support multiple platforms, specifically Windows, Linux, and Mac.
6. PDAL is open source and is released under a BSD license. See License for more information.