At Ordnance Survey we create a lot of varied geographic data using many different tools. For a project on automatically generating lines representing the high and low tides we compared the relative effectiveness of one open source tool, GDAL, against a couple of non-open source ones. Apparently, GDAL is pretty good! (with some fixable caveats).

In this lightening talk I'll be demonstrating the use case for GDAL in the admittedly narrow context of generating tide lines, comparing some outputs with paid-for solutions, and generally considering the strengths of open source tools.