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

Chapter 5. Working with Geospatial Data in Python

In this chapter, we will combine the Python libraries and geospatial data covered earlier and use them to accomplish a variety of tasks. These tasks have been chosen to demonstrate various techniques for working with geospatial data in your Python programs; while in some cases there are quicker and easier ways to achieve these results (for example, using command-line utilities) we will create these solutions in Python so that you can learn how to work with geospatial data in your own Python programs.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

  • Working with geospatial data in both vector and raster format

  • Changing the datums and projections used by geospatial data

  • Performing geospatial calculations on points, lines, and polygons

  • Converting and standardizing units of geometry and distance

This chapter is formatted like a cookbook, detailing various real-world tasks you might want to perform and providing "recipes" for accomplishing them.