Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Erik Westra
Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Erik Westra

Overview of this book

Geospatial development links your data to places on the Earth's surface. Writing geospatial programs involves tasks such as grouping data by location, storing and analyzing large amounts of spatial information, performing complex geospatial calculations, and drawing colorful interactive maps. In order to do this well, you'll need appropriate tools and techniques, as well as a thorough understanding of geospatial concepts such as map projections, datums and coordinate systems. Python Geospatial Development - Second Edition teaches you everything you need to know about writing geospatial applications using Python. No prior knowledge of geospatial concepts, tools or techniques is required. The book guides you through the process of installing and using various toolkits, obtaining geospatial data for use in your programs, and building complete and sophisticated geospatial applications in Python. Python Geospatial Development teaches you everything you need to know about writing geospatial applications using Python. No prior knowledge of geospatial concepts, tools or techniques is required. The book guides you through the process of installing and using various toolkits, obtaining geospatial data for use in your programs, and building complete and sophisticated geospatial applications in Python. This book provides an overview of the major geospatial concepts, data sources and toolkits. It teaches you how to store and access spatial data using Python, how to perform a range of spatial calculations, and how to store spatial data in a database. Because maps are such an important aspect of geospatial programming, the book teaches you how to build your own “slippy map” interface within a web application, and finishes with the detailed construction of a geospatial data editor using Geodjango. Whether you want to write quick utilities to solve spatial problems, or develop sophisticated web applications based around maps and geospatial data, this book includes everything you need to know.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Python Geospatial Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we have implemented, tested, and made improvements to a simple web-based application which displays shorelines, towns, and lakes (DISTAL) within a given radius of a starting point. This application was the impetus for exploring a number of important concepts within geospatial application development, including the following:

  • The creation of a simple but complete web-based geospatial application

  • Using databases to store and work with large amounts of geospatial data

  • Using a "black-box" map rendering module to create maps using spatial data selected from a database

  • Examining the issues involved in identifying features based on their true distance rather than using a lat/long approximation

  • Learning how to use spatial joins effectively

  • Exploring usability issues in a prototype implementation

  • Dealing with issues of data quality

  • Learning how to precalculate data to improve performance

As a result of our development efforts, we have learned the following:

  • Setting up a database and...