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

dbfpy


Both OGR and PyShp read and write the dbf files because they are part of the shapefile specification. The dbf files contain the attributes and fields for the shapefiles. However, both libraries have very basic dbf support. Occasionally, you will need to do some heavy duty dbf work. The dbfpy3 module is a pure Python module dedicated to working with dbf files. It is currently hosted on github.com only. You can force easy_install to find the download by specifying the download file:

easy_install -f https://github.com/GeospatialPython/dbfpy3/archive/master.zip

If you are using pip to install packages, use the following command:

pip install https://github.com/GeospatialPython/dbfpy3/archive/master.zip

The following shapefile has over 600 dbf records representing U.S. Census Bureau tracts which make it a good sample for trying out dbfpy:

https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/GIS_CensusTract.zip

Let's open up the dbf file of this shapefile and look at the first record:

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