Our mapping application will display a world map, allowing the user to zoom and pan, and display various landmarks on the map. If the user clicks on a landmark, information about that landmark will be displayed.
We'll call our application Lex, which is short for Landmark explorer. Lex will make use of two freely available geospatial datasets: a high-resolution shaded-relief basemap, and a comprehensive database of place names, which we will use as the list of landmarks to display:
We will build our Lex application using PyQt, and make use of the PyQGIS libraries built into QGIS to do most of the hard work.
Our requirements for the Lex application are as follows:
It must run as a turnkey application. Double-clicking on the launcher script must start the PyQt program, load all the data, and present a complete working application to the user.
The user interface must be as professional as possible, with keyboard shortcuts and good-looking toolbar icons.
When the user clicks on a landmark...