Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Third Edition

By : Erik Westra
Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Third Edition

By: Erik Westra

Overview of this book

Geospatial development links your data to locations on the surface of the Earth. 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. This book provides an overview of the major geospatial concepts, data sources, and toolkits. It starts by showing 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. Further on, 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 the GeoDjango framework. By the end of this book, you will be able to confidently use Python to write your own geospatial applications ranging from quick, one-off utilities to sophisticated web-based applications using maps and other geospatial data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Python Geospatial Development Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

A closer look at three specific tools and techniques


In the final three chapters of this book, we will build a complete sophisticated geospatial web application called ShapeEditor. The ShapeEditor is built on top of a number of existing technologies; before we can start implementing it, we need to become familiar with these technologies. In this section, we will learn about three of the key tools and techniques used to implement the ShapeEditor: the Tile Map Service protocol, OpenLayers, and GeoDjango.

The Tile Map Service protocol

The Tile Map Service (TMS) protocol defines the interface for a web service that returns map tile images upon request. The TMS protocol is similar to WMS, except that it is simpler and more oriented towards the storage and retrieval of map tiles rather than arbitrarily-specified complete maps.

The TMS protocol uses RESTful principles, which means that the URL used to access the web service includes all of the information needed to complete a request. Unlike WMS,...