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

Dealing with the anti-meridian line


If you explore the DISTAL application, you will soon discover a major usability problem with some of the countries. For example, if you click on United States in the Select Country page, you will be presented with the following map to click on:

Accurately clicking on a desired point using this map would be almost impossible because it covers most of the earth's surface.

The problem is that Alaska crosses the anti-meridian line. The anti-meridian line is the line where the left and right sides of the world map join, that is, at ±180 degrees of longitude. Because of the way longitude values wrap around the globe, -180 degrees of longitude is the same as +180 degrees of longitude. The ±180 degree line is called the anti-meridian line and is the cause of many problems when dealing with geospatial data.

In the case of the USA, part of the Alaskan peninsula extends beyond 180 degrees west and continues across the Aleutian Islands to finish at Attu Island, which...