Book Image

Geospatial Development By Example with Python

By : Pablo Carreira
5 (1)
Book Image

Geospatial Development By Example with Python

5 (1)
By: Pablo Carreira

Overview of this book

From Python programming good practices to the advanced use of analysis packages, this book teaches you how to write applications that will perform complex geoprocessing tasks that can be replicated and reused. Much more than simple scripts, you will write functions to import data, create Python classes that represent your features, and learn how to combine and filter them. With pluggable mechanisms, you will learn how to visualize data and the results of analysis in beautiful maps that can be batch-generated and embedded into documents or web pages. Finally, you will learn how to consume and process an enormous amount of data very efficiently by using advanced tools and modern computers’ parallel processing capabilities.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Geospatial Development By Example with Python
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Knowing Mapnik


Mapnik is the tool that we will use to produce our maps. It's a very powerful mapping library used by many websites.

In this first topic, we will go through some experiments to get to know Mapnik's features.

Now we will perform a few experiments with Mapnik in order to know how it works. First, let's organize the code for this chapter:

  1. Inside your geopy project, copy the Chapter4 folder and rename it to Chapter5.

  2. Inside the Chapter5 folder, create a new folder named mapnik_experiments. To do that, right-click in your Chapter5 folder and choose New | Directory.

  3. Still in Chapter5, create another folder named output; we will place the maps and images we create into that folder.

Making a map with pure Python

Mapnik has two ways to define a map; one uses pure Python code, the other an XML file.

Mapnik's Python API is very extensive and wraps almost all of the package's functionalities. In the next steps we will experiment with making a map with Python code only.

  1. Inside mapnik_experiments...