Book Image

Mastering Geospatial Analysis with Python

By : Silas Toms, Paul Crickard, Eric van Rees
Book Image

Mastering Geospatial Analysis with Python

By: Silas Toms, Paul Crickard, Eric van Rees

Overview of this book

Python comes with a host of open source libraries and tools that help you work on professional geoprocessing tasks without investing in expensive tools. This book will introduce Python developers, both new and experienced, to a variety of new code libraries that have been developed to perform geospatial analysis, statistical analysis, and data management. This book will use examples and code snippets that will help explain how Python 3 differs from Python 2, and how these new code libraries can be used to solve age-old problems in geospatial analysis. You will begin by understanding what geoprocessing is and explore the tools and libraries that Python 3 offers. You will then learn to use Python code libraries to read and write geospatial data. You will then learn to perform geospatial queries within databases and learn PyQGIS to automate analysis within the QGIS mapping suite. Moving forward, you will explore the newly released ArcGIS API for Python and ArcGIS Online to perform geospatial analysis and create ArcGIS Online web maps. Further, you will deep dive into Python Geospatial web frameworks and learn to create a geospatial REST API.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
7
Geoprocessing with Geodatabases
Index

Writing custom toolboxes


Writing toolboxes will allow you to automate several tasks and make that code available to users as a GUI, or to other developers as an algorithm that can be executed using processing. In this section, you will learn how to create a toolbox and call it from processing.

In this chapter, you have learned how to load data from a file and from a PostGIS database. In this example, you will learn how to bring data in to QGIS from the SeeClickFix Application Program Interface (API).

Note

SeeClickFix is a 311 reporting system that is used by many cities in the United States. It contains geospatial data and has a very well documented, and user-friendly API.

To create a new script, open the processing toolbox in QGIS. This will open an editor window. You will write your code in this window and save it using the save icon. The file name will become a toolbox under Tools|User scripts|File name. Save the file and name it SeeClickFix.

Now that you have an empty toolbox, we can start...