Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python

By : Joel Lawhead
Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python

By: Joel Lawhead

Overview of this book

Geospatial Analysis is used in almost every field you can think of from medicine, to defense, to farming. This book will guide you gently into this exciting and complex field. It walks you through the building blocks of geospatial analysis and how to apply them to influence decision making using the latest Python software. Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python, 2nd Edition uses the expressive and powerful Python 3 programming language to guide you through geographic information systems, remote sensing, topography, and more, while providing a framework for you to approach geospatial analysis effectively, but on your own terms. We start by giving you a little background on the field, and a survey of the techniques and technology used. We then split the field into its component specialty areas: GIS, remote sensing, elevation data, advanced modeling, and real-time data. This book will teach you everything you need to know about, Geospatial Analysis from using a particular software package or API to using generic algorithms that can be applied. This book focuses on pure Python whenever possible to minimize compiling platform-dependent binaries, so that you don’t become bogged down in just getting ready to do analysis. This book will round out your technical library through handy recipes that will give you a good understanding of a field that supplements many a modern day human endeavors.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

PyMySQL


The popular MySQL (available at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads) database is gradually evolving spatial functions. It has support for OGC geometries and a few spatial functions. It also has a pure Python API available in the PyMySQL library. The limited spatial functions use planar geometry and bounding rectangles as opposed to spherical geometry and shapes. The latest development release of MySQL contains some additional functions that improve this capability.

In the following example, we'll create a database in MySQL called spatial_db. Then, we'll add a table called PLACES with a geometry column. Next, we'll add two cities as point locations. And finally, we'll calculate the distance using MySQL's ST_Distance function and then convert the result from degrees to miles:

>>> import pymysql

>>> conn = pymysql.connect(host='localhost', port=3306, user='root', passwd='', db='mysql')
>>> cur = conn.cursor()
>>> cur.execute("DROP DATABASE IF EXISTS spatial_db...