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

Application review and improvements


At this stage, we have a complete implementation of the DISTAL system that works as advertised: a user can choose a country, enter a search radius in miles, click on a starting point, and see a high-resolution map showing all the place names within the desired search radius. We have solved the distance problem, and have all the data needed to search for place names anywhere in the world.

Of course, we aren't finished yet. There are several areas where our DISTAL application doesn't work as it should, including the following:

  • Usability

  • Quality

  • Performance

Let's take a look at each of these issues, and see how we could improve our design and implementation of the DISTAL system.

Usability

If you explore the DISTAL application, you will soon discover a major usability problem with some of the countries. For example, if you click on the United States in the Select Country page, you will be presented with the following map to click on:

Accurately clicking on a desired...