Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Erik Westra
Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Erik Westra

Overview of this book

Geospatial development links your data to places on the Earth's surface. 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. Python Geospatial Development - Second Edition teaches you everything you need to know about writing geospatial applications using Python. No prior knowledge of geospatial concepts, tools or techniques is required. The book guides you through the process of installing and using various toolkits, obtaining geospatial data for use in your programs, and building complete and sophisticated geospatial applications in Python. Python Geospatial Development teaches you everything you need to know about writing geospatial applications using Python. No prior knowledge of geospatial concepts, tools or techniques is required. The book guides you through the process of installing and using various toolkits, obtaining geospatial data for use in your programs, and building complete and sophisticated geospatial applications in Python. This book provides an overview of the major geospatial concepts, data sources and toolkits. It teaches 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. Because maps are such an important aspect of geospatial programming, 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 Geodjango. Whether you want to write quick utilities to solve spatial problems, or develop sophisticated web applications based around maps and geospatial data, this book includes everything you need to know.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Python Geospatial Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Designing and building the database


Let's start our design of the DISTAL application by thinking about the various pieces of data it will require:

  • A list of all the countries. Each country needs to include a simple boundary map which can be displayed to the user.

  • Detailed shoreline and lake boundaries worldwide.

  • A list of all major cities and towns worldwide. For each city/town, we need to have the name of the city/town and a point representing the location of that town or city.

Fortunately, this data is readily available:

  • The list of countries and their outlines are included in the World Borders Dataset.

  • Shoreline and lake boundaries (as well as other land-water boundaries such as islands within lakes) are readily available using the GSHHS shoreline database.

    City and town data can be found in two places: The GNIS Database (http://geonames.usgs.gov/domestic) provides official place-name data for the United States, while the GEOnet Names Server (http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html) provides similar...