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

Editing shapefiles


Shapefiles are a fundamental data format in GIS used both for exchanging data as well as performing GIS analysis. In this section, we'll learn how to work with these files extensively. In Chapter 2, Geospatial Data, we discussed shapefiles as a format which can have many different file types associated with it. For editing shapefiles and most other operations, we are only concerned with two types: the .shp file and the .dbf file.

The .shp file contains the geometry while the .dbf file contains the attributes of the corresponding geometry. For each geometry record in a shapefile, there is one dbf record. The records aren't numbered or identified in any way. This means while adding and deleting information from a shapefile, you must be careful to remove or add a record to each file type to match.

As discussed in Chapter 4, Geospatial Python Toolbox, there are two libraries to edit shapefiles in Python. One is the Python bindings to the OGR library. The other is the PyShp library...