Book Image

PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Pedro Wightman, Bborie Park, Stephen Vincent Mather, Thomas Kraft, Mayra Zurbarán
Book Image

PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Pedro Wightman, Bborie Park, Stephen Vincent Mather, Thomas Kraft, Mayra Zurbarán

Overview of this book

PostGIS is a spatial database that integrates the advanced storage and analysis of vector and raster data, and is remarkably flexible and powerful. PostGIS provides support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database and is currently the most popular open source spatial databases. If you want to explore the complete range of PostGIS techniques and expose related extensions, then this book is for you. This book is a comprehensive guide to PostGIS tools and concepts which are required to manage, manipulate, and analyze spatial data in PostGIS. It covers key spatial data manipulation tasks, explaining not only how each task is performed, but also why. It provides practical guidance allowing you to safely take advantage of the advanced technology in PostGIS in order to simplify your spatial database administration tasks. Furthermore, you will learn to take advantage of basic and advanced vector, raster, and routing approaches along with the concepts of data maintenance, optimization, and performance, and will help you to integrate these into a large ecosystem of desktop and web tools. By the end, you will be armed with all the tools and instructions you need to both manage the spatial database system and make better decisions as your project's requirements evolve.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Writing PostGIS vector data with OGR Python bindings


In this recipe, you will use Python and the Python bindings of the GDAL/OGR library to create a script for geocoding a list of the names of places using one of the GeoNames web services (http://www.geonames.org/export/ws-overview.html). You will use the Wikipedia Fulltext Search web service (http://www.geonames.org/export/wikipedia-webservice.html#wikipediaSearch), which for a given search string returns the coordinates of the places matching that search string as the output, and some other useful attributes from Wikipedia, including the Wikipedia page title and url.

The script should first create a PostGIS point layer named wikiplaces in which all of the locations and their attributes returned by the web service will be stored.

This recipe should give you the basis to use other similar web services, such as Google Maps, Yahoo! BOSS Geo Services, and so on, to get results in a similar way.

Before you start, please note the terms of use of...