Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python

By : Joel Lawhead
Book Image

Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python

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. This book will guide you gently into this exciting and complex field. It walks you through the building blocks of geospatial analysis and how to apply them to influence decision making using the latest Python software. Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python, 2nd Edition uses the expressive and powerful Python 3 programming language to guide you through geographic information systems, remote sensing, topography, and more, while providing a framework for you to approach geospatial analysis effectively, but on your own terms. We start by giving you a little background on the field, and a survey of the techniques and technology used. We then split the field into its component specialty areas: GIS, remote sensing, elevation data, advanced modeling, and real-time data. This book will teach you everything you need to know about, Geospatial Analysis from using a particular software package or API to using generic algorithms that can be applied. 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. This book will round out your technical library through handy recipes that will give you a good understanding of a field that supplements many a modern day human endeavors.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Spatial indexing


Geospatial datasets are often very large files easily reaching hundreds of megabytes or even several gigabytes in size. Geospatial software can be quite slow in trying to repeatedly access large files when performing analysis. As discussed briefly in Chapter 1, Learning Geospatial Analysis with Python, spatial indexing creates a guide, which allows software to quickly locate query results without examining every single feature in the dataset. Spatial indexes allow software to eliminate possibilities and perform more detailed searches or comparisons on a much smaller subset of the data.

Indexing algorithms

Many spatial indexing algorithms are derivatives of well-established algorithms used for decades on nonspatial information. The two most common spatial indexing algorithms are Quadtree index and R-tree index.

Quadtree index

The Quadtree algorithm actually represents a series of different algorithms based on a common theme. Each node in a Quadtree index contains four children...