The essence of geospatial analysis is using geometric shapes – points, lines, and polygons – to model the geography of real world objects and their location-based relationships. The simple shapes and their geometric properties of location, length and area are processed using geospatial operations to generate analysis results. It is the combination of modeled geographic data and the associated attribute information that separate geospatial information systems from all other information systems.

Until ArcPy, processing the feature class geometry using the geospatial operations was depended on the pre-built tools within ArcToolbox. ArcPy has made it possible to directly access the geometric shapes which are stored as mathematical representations in the shape field of feature classes. Once accessed, this geometric data is loaded into ArcPy geometry objects to make the data available for analysis within an ArcPy script. Because of this advance, writing...