Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python

By : Joel Lawhead
4 (1)
Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python

4 (1)
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. It is an approach to use statistical analysis and other informational engineering to data which has a geographical or geospatial aspect. And this typically involves applications capable of geospatial display and processing to get a compiled and useful data. "Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python" uses the expressive and powerful Python programming language to guide you through geographic information systems, remote sensing, topography, and more. It explains how to use a framework in order to approach Geospatial analysis effectively, but on your own terms. "Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python" starts with a background of the field, a survey of the techniques and technology used, and then splits the field into its component speciality areas: GIS, remote sensing, elevation data, advanced modelling, and real-time data. This book will teach you everything there is to know, from using a particular software package or API to using generic algorithms that can be applied to Geospatial analysis. 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. "Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python" will round out your technical library with handy recipes and a good understanding of a field that supplements many a modern day human endeavors.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Editing shapefiles


Shapefiles are a fundamental data format in GIS both for exchanging data as well as performing GIS analysis. In this section, we'll learn how to work with these files extensively. In Chapter 2, Geospatial Data, we discussed shapefiles as a format which can have many different file types associated with it. For editing shapefiles, and most other operations, we are only concerned with two types: the .shp file and the .dbf file.

The .shp file contains the geometry while the .dbf file contains the attributes of the corresponding geometry. For each geometry record in a shapefile, there is one dbf record. The records aren't numbered or identified in any way. This means when adding and deleting information from a shapefile, you must be careful to remove or add a record to each file type to match.

As discussed in Chapter 4, Geospatial Python Toolbox, there are two libraries to edit shapefiles in Python. One is the the Python bindings to the OGR library. The other is the PyShp library...