Book Image

Geospatial Development By Example with Python

By : Pablo Carreira
5 (1)
Book Image

Geospatial Development By Example with Python

5 (1)
By: Pablo Carreira

Overview of this book

From Python programming good practices to the advanced use of analysis packages, this book teaches you how to write applications that will perform complex geoprocessing tasks that can be replicated and reused. Much more than simple scripts, you will write functions to import data, create Python classes that represent your features, and learn how to combine and filter them. With pluggable mechanisms, you will learn how to visualize data and the results of analysis in beautiful maps that can be batch-generated and embedded into documents or web pages. Finally, you will learn how to consume and process an enormous amount of data very efficiently by using advanced tools and modern computers’ parallel processing capabilities.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Geospatial Development By Example with Python
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Representing geographic data


Most file formats that contain geographic data are made of a common simple structure consisting of a number of features, each containing a geometry and innumerous named properties.

Here, you can take a look at a sample of the contents of a GeoJSON file. This type of geographic file has the advantage of being human readable, allowing us to see exactly the structure that is being described. You don't need to type this example; just take a good look at it.

Its structure is very similar to a Python dictionary. At the uppermost level, there is FeatureCollection, which contains a list of features. Each feature has a geometry, whose type may vary, and a dictionary of properties that may contain any arbitrary property defined by the user. In brief, it follows exactly the described schema of data representation as shown in the following code:

{"type": "FeatureCollection",
 "features": [
    {"type": "Feature",
      "geometry": {
        "type": "Point",
        "coordinates...