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

Mapping NextBus locations


Now, we are ready to use this information to create our own map. The best source of freely available street mapping data is the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project: http://www.openstreetmap.org.

OSM also has a publicly available REST API called StaticMapLite to create static map images: http://staticmap.openstreetmap.de.

The OSM StaticMapLite API provides you with a GET API based on Google's static map API to create simple map images with a limited number of point markers and lines. A GET API, as opposed to REST, allows you to append name/value parameter pairs after a question mark on the URL. A REST API makes the parameters part of the URL path. We'll use the API to create our own NextBus API map on demand with a red pushpin icon for the bus location.

In the next example, we have condensed the previous script down to a compact function named nextbus(). The nextbus() function accepts an agency, route, command, and epoch as arguments. The command defaults to vehicleLocations...