Introduction to gpkg

In gpkg: Utilities for the Open Geospatial Consortium 'GeoPackage' Format

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>",
  eval = requireNamespace("terra", quietly = TRUE) && 
    requireNamespace("dbplyr", quietly = TRUE)
)

Background

gpkg provides high-level wrapper functions to build Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) 'GeoPackage' files. GDAL utilities for read and write of spatial data (vector and gridded) are provided via the {terra} package. Additional 'GeoPackage' and 'SQLite' specific functions manipulate attributes and tabular data via the {RSQLite} package.

What is a GeoPackage?

GeoPackage is an open, standards-based, platform-independent, portable, self-describing, compact format for transferring geospatial information. The GeoPackage Encoding Standard) describes a set of conventions for storing the following within an SQLite database:

• vector features

• tile matrix sets of imagery and raster maps at various scales

• attributes (non-spatial data)

• extensions

Create a Geopackage

gpkg_write() can handle a variety of different input types. Here we start by adding two DEM (GeoTIFF) files.

library(gpkg)
library(terra)

dem <- system.file("extdata", "dem.tif", package = "gpkg")
stopifnot(nchar(dem) > 0)
gpkg_tmp <- tempfile(fileext = ".gpkg")

if (file.exists(gpkg_tmp))
  file.remove(gpkg_tmp)

# write a gpkg with two DEMs in it
gpkg_write(
  dem,
  destfile = gpkg_tmp,
  RASTER_TABLE = "DEM1",
  FIELD_NAME = "Elevation"
)

gpkg_write(
  dem,
  destfile = gpkg_tmp,
  append = TRUE,
  RASTER_TABLE = "DEM2",
  FIELD_NAME = "Elevation",
  NoData = -9999
)

Insert Vector Layers

We can also write vector data to GeoPackage. Here we use gpkg_write() to add a bounding box polygon layer derived from extent of "DEM1".

# add bounding polygon vector layer via named list
r <- gpkg_tables(gpkg_tmp)[['DEM1']]
v <- terra::as.polygons(r, ext = TRUE)
gpkg_write(list(bbox = v), destfile = gpkg_tmp)

Insert Attribute Table

Similarly, data.frame-like objects (non-spatial "attributes") can be written to GeoPackage.

z <- data.frame(a = 1:10, b = LETTERS[1:10])
gpkg_write(list(myattr = z), destfile = gpkg_tmp)

Read a GeoPackage

geopackage() is a constructor that can create a simple container for working with geopackages from several types of inputs. Often you will have a character file path to a GeoPackage (.gpkg) file.

g <- geopackage(gpkg_tmp, connect = TRUE)
g
class(g)

Other times you may have a list of tables and layers you want to be in a GeoPackage that does not exist yet.

g2 <- geopackage(list(dem = r, bbox = v))
g2
class(g2)

Note that a temporary GeoPackage ({r, eval=exists(g2)} gpkg_source(g2)) is automatically created when using the geopackage(<list>) constructor.

You also may have a DBIConnection to a GeoPackage database already opened that you want to use. In any case (character, list, SQLiteConnection) there is an S3 method to facilitate creating the basic geopackage class provided by {gpkg}. All other methods are designed to be able to work smoothly with geopackage class input.

Inspect Contents of GeoPackage

We can list the table names in a GeoPackage with gpkg_list_tables() and fetch pointers (SpatRaster, SpatVectorProxy, and lazy data.frame) to the data in them with gpkg_table(). We can check the status of the internal geopackage class SQLiteConnection with gpkg_is_connected() and disconnect it with gpkg_disconnect().

# enumerate tables
gpkg_list_tables(g)

# inspect tables
gpkg_tables(g)

# inspect a specific table
gpkg_table(g, "myattr", collect = TRUE)

Note that the collect = TRUE forces data be loaded into R memory for vector and attribute data; this is the difference in result object class of SpatVectorProxy/SpatVector and tbl_SQLiteConnection/data.frame for vector and attribute data, respectively.

gpkg_collect() is a helper method to call gpkg_table(..., collect = TRUE) for in-memory loading of specific tables.

gpkg_collect(g, "DEM1")

Note that with grid data returned from gpkg_collect() you get a table result with the tile contents in a blob column of a data.frame instead of SpatRaster object.

The inverse function of gpkg_collect() is gpkg_tbl() which always returns a tbl_SQLiteConnection.

tb <- gpkg_tbl(g, "gpkg_contents")
tb

Note that with this lazy reference to table, the internal SQLiteConnection in g is the same as the source in tb:

gpkg_connection(g)@ptr
gpkg_connection(tb)@ptr

This means that you can handle all of your connections via the connect argument when creating a geopackage object, along with the gpkg_connect() and gpkg_disconnect() commands.

There are also a variety of convenience functions for the standard required tables in a geopackage.

For instance, gpkg_contents() collects the "gpkg_contents" table.

gpkg_contents(g)

Lazy Data Access

There are several other methods that can be used for working with tabular data in a GeoPackage in a "lazy" fashion.

Method 1: gpkg_table_pragma()

gpkg_table_pragma() is a low-frills data.frame result containing important table information, but not values. The PRAGMA table_info() is stored as a nested data.frame table_info. This representation has no dependencies beyond {RSQLite} and is efficient for inspection of table structure and attributes, though it is less useful for data analysis.

head(gpkg_table_pragma(g))

Method 2: gpkg_vect() and gpkg_query()

gpkg_vect() is a wrapper around terra::vect() you can use to create 'terra' SpatVector objects from the tables found in a GeoPackage.

gpkg_vect(g, 'bbox')

The table of interest need not have a geometry column, but this method does not work on GeoPackage that contain only gridded data, and some layer in the GeoPackage must have some geometry.

gpkg_vect(g, 'gpkg_ogr_contents')

The SpatVectorProxy is used for "lazy" references to of vector and attribute contents of a GeoPackage; this object for vector data is analogous to the SpatRaster for gridded data. The 'terra' package provides "GDAL plumbing" for filter and query utilities.

gpkg_query() by default uses the 'RSQLite' driver, but the richer capabilities of OGR data sources can be harnessed with SQLite SQL dialect. These additional features can be utilized with the ogr=TRUE argument to gpkg_query(), or gpkg_ogr_query() for short. This assumes that GDAL is built with support for SQLite (and ideally also with support for Spatialite).

For example, we use built-in functions such as ST_MinX() to calculate summaries for "bbox" table, geometry column "geom". In this case we expect the calculated quantities to match the coordinates/boundaries of the bounding box:

res <- gpkg_ogr_query(g, "SELECT 
                           ST_MinX(geom) AS xmin,
                           ST_MinY(geom) AS ymin, 
                           ST_MaxX(geom) AS xmax, 
                           ST_MaxY(geom) AS ymax 
                          FROM bbox")
as.data.frame(res)

Method 3: gpkg_rast()

Using gpkg_rast() you can quickly access references to all tile/gridded datasets in a GeoPackage.

For example:

gpkg_rast(g)

Method 4: gpkg_table()

With the gpkg_table() method you access a specific table (by name) and get a "lazy" tibble object referencing that table.

This is achieved via {dplyr} and the {dbplyr} database connection to the GeoPackage via the {RSQLite} driver. The resulting object's data can be used in more complex analyses by using other {dbplyr}/{tidyverse} functions.

For example, we inspect the contents of the gpkg_contents table that contains critical information on the data contained in a GeoPackage.

gpkg_table(g, "gpkg_contents")

As a more complicated example we access the gpkg_2d_gridded_tile_ancillary table, and perform some data processing.

We dplyr::select() mean and std_dev columns from the dplyr::filter()ed rows where tpudt_name == "DEM2". Finally we materialize a tibble with dplyr::collect():

library(dplyr, warn.conflicts = FALSE)

gpkg_table(g, "gpkg_2d_gridded_tile_ancillary") %>% 
  filter(tpudt_name == "DEM2") %>% 
  select(mean, std_dev) %>% 
  collect()

Managing Connections

Several helper methods are available for checking GeoPackage SQLiteConnection status, as well as connecting and disconnecting an existing geopackage object (g).

# still connected
gpkg_is_connected(g)

# disconnect 
gpkg_disconnect(g)

# reconnect
gpkg_connect(g)

# disconnect
gpkg_disconnect(g)

gpkg documentation built on April 3, 2025, 8:55 p.m.