The Data Access module provides the fundamental layer for applications that handle spatial data from different sources, ranging from traditional DBMSs to OGC Web Services.

This module is composed by some base abstract classes that must be extended to allow the creation of Data Access Drivers which actually implement all the details needed to access data in a specific format or system.

This module provides the base foundation for an application discover what is stored in a data source and how the data is organized in it.

Keep in mind that this organization is the low-level organization of the data. For instance, in a DBMS, you can find out the tables stored in a database and the relationships between them or detailed informations about their columns (data type, name and constraints).

It is not the role of this module to provide higher-level metadata about the data stored in a data source. This support is provided by another TerraLib module: Spatial Metadata module.

This section describes the Data Access module in details.