Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python

By : Joel Lawhead
Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python

By: Joel Lawhead

Overview of this book

Geospatial Analysis is used in almost every field you can think of from medicine, to defense, to farming. This book will guide you gently into this exciting and complex field. It walks you through the building blocks of geospatial analysis and how to apply them to influence decision making using the latest Python software. Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python, 2nd Edition uses the expressive and powerful Python 3 programming language to guide you through geographic information systems, remote sensing, topography, and more, while providing a framework for you to approach geospatial analysis effectively, but on your own terms. We start by giving you a little background on the field, and a survey of the techniques and technology used. We then split the field into its component specialty areas: GIS, remote sensing, elevation data, advanced modeling, and real-time data. This book will teach you everything you need to know about, Geospatial Analysis from using a particular software package or API to using generic algorithms that can be applied. This book focuses on pure Python whenever possible to minimize compiling platform-dependent binaries, so that you don’t become bogged down in just getting ready to do analysis. This book will round out your technical library through handy recipes that will give you a good understanding of a field that supplements many a modern day human endeavors.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Python markup and tag-based parsers


Tag-based data, particularly different XML dialects, have become a very popular way to distribute geospatial data. Formats that are both machine and human readable are generally easy to work with, though they sacrifice storage efficiency for usability. These formats can become unmanageable for very large datasets but work very well in most cases.

While most formats are some form of XML (such as KML or GML), there is a notable exception. The well-known text (WKT) format is fairly common but uses external markers and square brackets ([]) to surround data instead of tags in angled brackets around data like XML does.

Python has standard library support for XML as well as some excellent third-party libraries available. Proper XML formats all follow the same structure, so you can use a generic XML library to read it. Because XML is text-based, it is often easy to write it as a string instead of using an XML library. The vast majority of applications which output...