Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Third Edition

By : Erik Westra
Book Image

Python Geospatial Development - Third Edition

By: Erik Westra

Overview of this book

Geospatial development links your data to locations on the surface of the Earth. Writing geospatial programs involves tasks such as grouping data by location, storing and analyzing large amounts of spatial information, performing complex geospatial calculations, and drawing colorful interactive maps. In order to do this well, you’ll need appropriate tools and techniques, as well as a thorough understanding of geospatial concepts such as map projections, datums, and coordinate systems. This book provides an overview of the major geospatial concepts, data sources, and toolkits. It starts by showing you how to store and access spatial data using Python, how to perform a range of spatial calculations, and how to store spatial data in a database. Further on, the book teaches you how to build your own slippy map interface within a web application, and finishes with the detailed construction of a geospatial data editor using the GeoDjango framework. By the end of this book, you will be able to confidently use Python to write your own geospatial applications ranging from quick, one-off utilities to sophisticated web-based applications using maps and other geospatial data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Python Geospatial Development Third Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


You have now finished implementing the first part of the ShapeEditor application. Even at this early stage, you have made good progress, learning how GeoDjango works, designing the application, and laying the foundations for the functionality you will implement in the next two chapters.

In this chapter, you created your own GeoDjango project, designed the ShapeEditor system in detail, and broke it down into individual applications within the Django project. You defined the various database models that will be used by the ShapeEditor and set up a PostGIS database for storing the ShapeEditor's data. You then configured the built-in admin application so it could view and edit the database models you set up, and you used this application to view and edit your data. Finally, you saw how GeoDjango's GeoModelAdmin class allows the user to view and edit geospatial data using a slippy map.

In the next chapter, we will implement a view to display the list of available shapefiles as well as write...