Let's take a brief look at the process of working with GIS data manually. Before we can begin, there are two things you need to do:
Obtain some GIS data
Install the GDAL library and its Python bindings so that you can read the necessary data files
Let's use the US Census Bureau's web site to download a set of vector maps for the various US states. The main site for obtaining GIS data from the US Census Bureau can be found at http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger.
To make things simpler, though, let's bypass the web site and directly download the file we need from http://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2014/STATE/tl_2014_us_state.zip.
The file, tl_2014_us_state.zip
, should be a ZIP-format archive. After uncompressing the archive, you should have a directory containing the following files:
tl_2014_us_state.dbf
tl_2014_us_state.prj
tl_2014_us_state.shp
tl_2014_us_state.shx
These files make up a shapefile containing the outlines of all the US states...