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

Downloading the data


As mentioned in the previous section, the DISTAL application will make use of four separate sets of freely-available geospatial data:

  • The World Borders Dataset

  • The high-resolution GSHHS shoreline database

  • The GNIS Database of US place names

  • The GEONet Names Server's list of non-US place names

    Note

    For more information on these sources of data, please refer to Chapter 4, Sources of Geospatial Data

To keep track of the data as we download it, create a directory named something similar to DISTAL-data. Then it's time to download the information we need.

World Borders Dataset

If you haven't already done so, download the World Borders Dataset from:

http://thematicmapping.org/downloads/world_borders.php

When you decompress the TM_WORLD_BORDERS-0.3.zip archive, you will end up with a folder containing the World Borders Dataset in shapefile format. Move this folder into your DISTAL-data directory.

GSHHS

We next need to download the GSHHS shoreline database in shapefile format. If you haven...