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 Python library so that you can read the necessary data files
Let's use the U.S. Census Bureau's website to download a set of vector maps for the various U.S. states. The main site for obtaining GIS data from the U.S. Census Bureau can be found at:
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger
To make things simpler, though, let's bypass the website and directly download the file we need:
http://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2009/tl_2009_us_state.zip
The resulting file, tl_2009_us_state.zip
, should be a ZIP-format archive. After uncompressing the archive, you should have the following files:
tl_2009_us_state.dbf
tl_2009_us_state.prj
tl_2009_us_state.shp
tl_2009_us_state.shp.xml
tl_2009_us_state.shx
These files make up a Shapefile containing the outlines of all the U.S. states. Place these files together...