Fiona is OGR's neater API – sleek elegance on the outside, unstoppable OGR(e) on the inside.
Fiona provides a smoother and more productive Python interface to the open source GIS community's most trusted geodata access library; doing for libgdal what lxml does for libxml2. Fiona integrates readily with other Python GIS packages such as pyproj, Rtree, and Shapely.
Fiona requires libgdal 1.3.2+.
Tests require Nose. From the distribution root:
$ virtualenv . $ source bin/activate (Fiona)$ ./cypsrc (Fiona)$ python setup.py develop (Fiona)$ python setup.py nosetests
If GDAL/OGR headers and libs aren't installed to a well known location, you'll need to set environment variables before running the setup script or pass the locations in using setup arguments.
If you have osgeo.ogr installed, you can compare performance to Fiona:
$ python benchmark.py
See docs/reading-data.txt for examples.